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The Collected Writings 

of Denton J. Snider 



BIOGRAPHY 

OF 

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 



The play's the thing 
Wherein I'll catch the conscience of the King. 

Hamlet. 

So they loved, as love in twain 
Had the essence but in one; 
Two distincls, division none: 
Number there in love was slain. 
Hearts remote yet not assunder; 
Distance and no space was seen.— 

The Phoenix and the Turtle 

It tells the very purpose of my task 

To make you see the soul's artificer 

In the artificer's own soul inscribed. 

His many works are just one work at last, 

Three dozen plays a single play. 

Of which his Life is the right argument. 

The poet is himself his poem true 

His deepest song his own Biography. 

The Shakespeariad. 



A BIOGRAPHY 
OF 

V/iLLiAM Shakespeare 

SET FORTH AS HIS LIFE DRAMA 



DENTON j: snider 




MDCCCCXXri 

The WILLIAM HARVEY MINER CO.. Inc. 

SAINT LOUIS 



Copyright 1922 by 
DENTON J. SNIDER 

All rights reserved, including that o( 
translation into foreign languages In- 
cluding the Scandinavian. 



^^ 






Mound City Press, Inc. 
St. Lout's 

SEP -8 1922 

(0,aA68169 3 



T0 mg miU 



Shakespeare's Life-Drama 



CONTENTS 

Introduction 9 

Prologue 

The Stratford Youth 22 

I. The Shakespeares 27 

II. The Ardens 40 

III. Shakespeare the School Boy 50 

IV. The Adolescent Shakespeare 64 

V. Shakespeare 's Marriage 77 

VI. Departure from Stratford 90 

VII. The Age 99 

VIII. Drifting 108 

IX. Anchored 115 

(7) 



8 CONTENTS 

First Period. 

Apprenticeship , 138 

A. Collaboration 142 

I. Early Fellow Dramatist 145 

II. Henry VI 152 

III. Richard III 188 

B. Imitation- — Experiment 206 

I. The Epical Shakespeare 217 

II. The Lyrical Shakespeare 237 

III. The Dramatic Shakespeare 266 

C. Origination 355 

I. Comedies 375 

II. Histories 389 

III. Sonnets 426 

Second Period. 

The Master 's Tragedies 444 

Third Period. 

The Tragi-Comedies 480 

Death of Shakespeare 517 



Shakespeare's Life Drama 



INTRODUCTION. 

One of the most familiar passages in all Shake- 
speare, memorized by every declaiming schoolboy, 
and kept ever fresh by quotation in the mind of the 
adult, is the following: 

All the world's a stage, 
And all the men and women merely players, 
They have their exits and their entrances, 
And one man in his time plays many parts — 

What gives to these lines such enduring vitality 
is not simply the fact stated, which is trite enough, 
but the biographic touch, which throbs through 
them and makes them quiver with a kind of per- 
sonal avowal. Thus the poet hints his general 
world-view, undoubtedly derived from his par- 
ticular calling, since he was an actor as well as a 
writer, That is, he conceives here, under the mask 



10 SHAKESPEABE'S LIFE-DEAMA 

of the melancholy Jaques, human life as a whole 
to be a drama, and hence his own life in its whole- 
ness to be rightly a Life-drama, whose acts and 
scenes he as a man has been and still is playing. 

In like manner we hear the moody Antonio (in 
Merchant of Venice) utter his brooding sigh : 

I hold the world but as the world, Gratiano — 
A stage where every man must play his part 
And mine a sad one. 

To a tragic intensity deepens the guilty self- 
accusing Macbeth after his deeds of blood : 

Out, out, brief candle! 
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player 
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage, 
And then is heard no more. 

In a goodly number of similar comparisons 
strown throughout his works Shakespeare has 
emphasized the connection between his vocation 
and human life in general. Evidently he deems 
his dramatic productivity as the supreme expres- 
sion of his own career. His life in its entirety is 
his best drama, better and greater than any single 
drama, yea than all of them put together. Hence 
his biography, if we follow his view of himself, 
must be treated as a drama in conception and 
movement, though not necessarily in the dramatic 
form of dialogue. He is his own "one man" 
who "in his time plays many parts" — not only 
many acts and scenes, but many dramas, thirty- 



INTEODUCTION H 

six of them (some say more), which nevertheless 
make at last one drama of life, which we, follow- 
ing his authority, shall call Shakespeare's Life- 
drama. 

Not the poet's career, then, as a bead-roll of 
separate events told off in chronological sequence; 
nor do we here propose to pile together, one by 
one, Shakespeare's single plays into an aggregate 
more or less jointless; another idea and method 
are the present aim. Not Shakespeare's discon- 
nected dramas, but the one grand Shakespearian 
Pan-drama : such we may designate our theme ; not 
Shakespeare's thousandfold characters, but his one 
all-embracing world-character which is just his 
colossal personality; can we catch it, and make 
it illumine and irradiate the vast confusing multi- 
plicity which hides it, till we may not only 
see it, but formulate it in words for human 
apprehension? Let the confession be made that 
some hope of the sort has dictated the forthcoming 
book, and constitutes its best right to be written. 

Such is, in general, the scope of what we here 
call Shakespeare's Life-drama. For a larger, 
loftier drama than any or all his dramas is his 
life evolving in and through them, and creating 
them as its own highest self-expression and ful- 
filment. Though the ultimate form of his genius 
is for us the dramatic, we shall often find him 
chafing against its confining bounds, especially in 
the latter part of his career, when he, feeling if 
not looking backwards, instinctively throbbed with 



12 SHAKESPE ABE'S LIFE-DRAMA 

his life 's total deed, and more than once threatened 
to break over his Art's restraining conditions. 

It is now more than half a century since a dis- 
tinguished, disgusted commentator on a play of 
Shakespeare (Professor Craik) whose edition we 
pored over in our boyhood, lit up his rather dry 
page with a smart flash of splenetic humor: 
"After all the commentatorship and criticism of 
which the works of Shakespeare have been the 
subject, they still remain to be ° studied in their 
totality with a special reference to himself." 
Such was the Professor's growl, which had a 
lurking tendency to turn back upon himself, for 
just he was one of those sinning commentators. 
But he goes on with his polite grumble : ' ' The man 
Shakespeare as read in his works — Shakespeare 
as there revealed not only in his genius and intel- 
lectual power, but in his character, disposition, 
temper ... is a book yet to be written." 
So spake longingly, even if rather vaguely, the 
somewhat soured but very worthy exegete, and 
his damnatory judgment largely holds good today 
in spite of the deluge of print pouring over and 
about Shakespeare since it was uttered. 

Nevertheless we chronicle our belief that the 
aspiration to know Shakespeare in his entirety and 
as an entirety has been emphatically on the in- 
crease in recent years. The bolder-hearted student 
no longer rests content with the beautiful passages, 
with the unique characters, or even with the iso- 
lated dramas; he must grasp the total work and 



INTEODUCTION 13 

with it the total man creating it in the very process 
of ci-eation. He has come to feel that he cannot 
know truly the part without knowing the whole, 
that any part of Shakespear.e is such by sharing in 
and helping to constitute the whole Shakespeare. 
In other words, the supreme object to be attained is 
the man himself, the very personality of the 
sovereign poet. 

What is this personality? Something hard to 
define, since it is itself just the ultimate definer of 
all things, including itself. But we may conceive 
the dramas, poems, characters of Shakespeare as 
effulgences or emanations from one central creative 
sun ; these his works are converging lines or radiant 
light-paths leading back to the primal source, 
which is his personality. Along these rays of light 
streaming from the middle luminary we are to 
travel back through vision to the man himself at 
the heart of all his labors, which have radiated 
from himself. There is at bottom but one char- 
acter in all the plays of Shakespeare, and that is 
his own, himself, or his Self. If we can catch that 
and commune with it and appropriate it, we have 
attained a chief, yea the one greatest blessing of 
Shakespearian study. Thus from the external 
manifestations of the Genius we penetrate to his 
inner creative essence, to his personality. 

Such an outlook we may here take in advance, 
recollecting, however, that it must be dim, vague, 
undefined at the beginning, since the course of the 
entire book is to illumine just this personality and 



14 SHAKESPE ABE'S LIFE-DBAMA 

to bring it into clearer definition. A biography of 
a Great Man has hardly won its worth unless it 
introduces us into his soul's own process as re- 
vealed not merely in his life's chronicled events, 
but also in the genetic unfolding of his works. 

Having thus declared the prime article of our 
biographic faith, we must next get ready to face 
its denier, who upholds the view that Shakespeare 
himself lies completely hidden, unknown and un- 
knowable, within and behind all his characters. It 
is the sad lot of us poor mortals that we never can 
get really acquainted with his elusive self-secreting 
personality. Although the highest authority calls 
upon us to know even God, and openly promises us 
that beatitude, still we can never know "William 
Shakespeare the man, the human soul, as he is in 
himself. That this forthcoming book of ours 
refuses to accept any such skeptical view of 
Shakespeare (and of God too, for that matter), 
and will proceed to build itself upon the opposite 
plan, may here, by way of preface and perchance 
of warning, be stoutly affirmed. 

It is, however, but fair to the reader to tell him 
that very eminent Shakespearians there are, who 
with equal positiveness maintain the unknowability 
of the man Shakespeare. That is, the Shake- 
spearian self in its distinctive individuality is so 
completely veiled under its dramatic mask that 
its workings and its inner evolution cannot be 
unriddled. We shall cite first the most distin- 
guished upholder of this opinion, Dr. H. H. 



INTBODUCTION 15 

Furness, editor of that monumental work, the New 
Variorum Shakespeare, who prints in the preface 
to his edition of As You Like It, as follows: ''I 
confess to absolute scepticism in reference to the 
belief that in these dramas Shakespeare's self can 
be discovered (except on the broadest lines), or 
that either his outer or inner life is to any 
discoverable degree reflected in his plays: it is be- 
cause Shakespeare is not there that the characters 
are so perfect. The smallest dash of the author's 
self would mar to that extent the truth of the 
character, and make of it a mask." So thinks the 
learned Doctor, who especially denounces "the 
error to infer from his (Shakespeare's) tragedies 
that his life was certainly sad, or that because his 
life was sad we have his tragedies. ' ' Thus Furness 
denies the validity of the very generally accepted 
tragic Period of the poet 's life. Moreover it should 
be set down for our right appreciation that he, our 
greatest American Editor, seems to fathom the 
ultimate underlying motive of the grand Shake- 
spearian achievement in this astounding wise : "I 
believe that Shakespeare wrote his plays to fill the 
theater and make money for his fellow-actors and 
for himself." Certainly so, but is that all the 
answer there is to his life 's greatness ? Still, as for 
me, I am fain to believe that Furness treats him- 
self with scant justice in the foregoing manifesta- 
tion of his mentality ; he shows himself here at his 
worst, for he has now and then bad spells in spite 
of his prevailing good-sense and good-humor. 



16 SHAKESPE ABE'S LIFE-DBAMA 

A second eminent Shakespearian who is disin- 
clined to see Shakespeare in Shakespeare, is the 
Englishman Sir Sidney Lee, who has written a 
large Life of the poet, very useful for its collection 
of materials and for its far-probing historic re- 
search. The book deserves its popular vogue on 
account of its excellent presentation of Shake- 
speare 's body, even if it leaves out and often denies 
his soul. The negation of Sir Sidney is turned 
most fiercely and long-windedly against the Son- 
nets, whose autobiographic value he belittles quite 
to zero. His reading overwhelms us by its Oceanic 
extent, hardly by its depth ; very valuable becomes 
often his widely gathered information, especially 
on the Sonnets, if we draw from his facts not his 
conclusions, but just the opposite. 

Such is the re-actionary view concerning Shake- 
speare's biography held by two of the time's fore- 
most expositors of the poet. Of course the present 
book will insist upon its right and duty to run 
counter to such high authority, which in this case 
fails, as we think, to penetrate to the essential fact 
not only of Shakespeare's work, but of all Litera- 
ture, namely the personality of the man creating 
it, and therein revealing his creative self at its 
highest. 

Every biographical account of Shakespeare ac- 
cepts these three main divisions of his external 
career : his youth at Stratford where he was born, 
educated, and married ; then his active manhood in 
London, where his dramatic and literary work was 



INTBODUCTION 17 

done ; finally his return and retirement to his home 
at Stratford, where he passed a quiet but by no 
means idle time till his decease. That is, Shake- 
speare's Life-drama, regarded as embracing all 
his days, falls of itself into three separate com- 
partments, which external division has its internal 
correspondence in his spirit's evolution. Accord- 
ingly, if we model our exposition of his career 
after the prime historic facts of it, we shall have 
to consider it under the following heads : 

(1) The youth Shakespeare at Stratford; 

(2) The man Shakespeare at London; 

(3) Shakespeare's Return to Stratford. 

These three divisions, while local on the outside 
and thus external, show also the organism of his 
life's deeds and events, as well as the sweep of his 
soul's history. Shakespeare was not a very old 
man in years when he "died, still he had practically 
completed his work, he had fulfilled the round of 
his career. It is quite generally agreed that he 
added no drama or poem to the Shakespearian 
canon, as it has come down to us, during the last 
four years of his life. But that he was intellectu- 
ally stagnant we cannot believe. At least he was 
looking backward, and could hardly be rid of much 
deep and searching reminiscence. 

The most casual glance cannot help observing 
that here is a round or cycle of places which starts 
with Stratford, moves to and through London, and 



18 SHAKESPE ABE'S LIFE-DBAMA 

returns to Stratford. In this outer spatial circuit 
is included at the same time the rounded sweep of 
his life in its three ordinary stages — the youth 
Shakespeare, the middle-aged ShaJcespeare, the old- 
getting Shakespeare. Corresponding to these phys- 
ical stages of the man are his psychical ones, which 
together show his completed human fulfilment. 

Was the poet aware of this movement of himself, 
especially of its inner phase? If we watch him 
closely, we shall often catch him periodizing the 
world, including in his sweep events, man, and 
necessarily himself. Eevolution is one of his terms 
for this thought, which his thinker Hamlet utters 
on viewing the skulls of the grave-yard : ' ' Here 's 
fine revolution, an we had the trick to see it." 
The pleasure-loving Antony sees the round of him- 
self in his own deepest trait : 

The present pleasure. 
By revolution lowering, does become 
The opposite of itself. 

More than once the poet reflects upon the tragic 
recoil of the deed, "whose bloody instructions re- 
turn to plague the inventor. ' ' Also in his comedies 
he fails not to give a humorous tinge to the comic 
revolution : ' ' Thus the whirligig of time brings 
in his revenges," as the clown sums up the action 
in Twelfth Night. The inspired Maid of Orleans 
declares in prophetic rapture: ''With Henry's 
death the English circle ends." And Edmund, 
Satan's representative, in King Lear, pronounces 



INTEODUCTION 19 

the pivotal thought and word in a dying vision of 
tr dth : 

Thou hast spoken right, 'tis true ; 
The wheel has come full circle — I am here. 

Meditating on the round in Nature and Mind we 
often find him in the Sonnets, which undoubtedly 
reveal his most intimate self-communings. Thus 
he glimpses his life's epochs (Sonnet 60) : 

Nativity, once in the main of light, 
Crawls to maturity, wherewith being crowned. 
Crooked eclipses 'gainst his glory fight. 
And Time that gave doth now his gift con- 
found. 

Here plays a gleam of his three phases of life: 
Nativity crawling toward maturity, which is then 
crowned with his brightest works (we may sup- 
pose) whose glory, however, is darkened by 
"crooked eclipses" till lowering Time finally re- 
scinds his supreme endowment. So the poet visions 
his life's stages quite as he has passed through 
them, in outset, in sequence, and in significance. 
Especially circling Time he shows to be a favorite 
theme of his contemplation ; through all his works, 
but more particularly through his Sonnets, runs 
a unique philosophy of Time and signalizes the 
deep thinker-poet. 

Here we must not fail to take notice of Shake- 
speare's defiant attitude toward Time, whose in- 
sidious power of change and destruction he chal- 
lenges forthright (No. 123) : 



20 SHAKESPE ABE'S LIFE-DBAMA 

No, Time, thou shalt not boast that I do 

change. 
Thy pyramids built up with newer might 
To me are nothing novel, nothing strange — 

He proclaims himself the same Shakespeare, the 
same personality (or / am) in all his works, being 
more primordial and enduring than the Pyramids. 
And now we are to hear his mighty oath in defiance 
of all the lying appearances and negations of Time 
(Sonnet 123) : 

Thy registers and thee I both defy, 
Not wondering at the present nor the past ; 
For thy records and what we see, do lie, 
Made more or less by thy continual haste. 
This do I vow, and this shall ever be, 
I will be true, despite thy scythe and thee. 

So he trumpets his dare at the arch Deceiver and 
Destroyer, the old hoary Time-devil, father of all 
illusion and decadence, whereupon he takes his vow 
of fealty to the true and eternal principle of his 
genius. And it would seem proper that his bio- 
grapher ought to repeat the same vow on starting 
to reproduce in writ the poet's record of achieve- 
ment. 

Picking up the three fore-mentioned divisions of 
Shakespeare's life, which seem sharply marked off 
in locality as if for the reader's first pointer, we 
may set them down here in advance of their fuller 
exposition, as the three leading parts of the Poet's 
entire Life-drama: 



INTBODUCTION 21 

I. Prologue at Stratford. 

II. Pan-drama at London. 

III. Epilogue at Stratford. 

It may be here prefaced that the middle years of 
Shakespeare's activity, embracing his supremely 
creative time at London, will receive our pen's 
fullest detail and emphasis in the forthcoming bio- 
graphic venture. But we shall also spend more 
than usual attention upon the poet's Life-prologue 
at Stratford, unfolding as completely as possible 
the very formative and no means scant education 
of the youth Shakespeare, since that portion of his 
Career has hitherto been quite insufficiently con- 
ceived and handled, as we judge the matter. The 
third part above scheduled, namely the poet's re- 
turn to Stratford, which takes place in his advanc- 
ing age, but not all at once, is to receive due no- 
tice along the course of the narrative, but cannot 
be specially expanded in this book. 



The Stratford Youth. 
1564-1585. 

So to this Life-drama must here be premised a 
Life-prologue, that is, a prologue which has been 
lived and achieved in the deed, and which is now 
to be set down in writ, being a kind of foreshow, 
and even prophecy of the poet's approaching Lon- 
don Pan-drama, if we dare unify his work thus to 
a word. Prologue is a term often employed by 
Shakespeare, both literally and metaphorically, to 
designate ' ' the harbinger preceding still the fates ' ' 
of his play, and so named the ''Prologue to the 
omen (event) coming on" — which term I find re- 
corded more than a score of times in his theatrical 
dictionary. 

Some twenty-one years, according to our esti- 
mate, make up the duration of this living Prologue 
of Shakespeare, wliieh has its own special evolution 
(22) 



THE STBATFOBD YOUTH 23 

from the man's birth till his majority. In order 
to understand the forthcoming greatness of the 
dramatist, we must construe or rather visualize his 
youthful career at Stratford. We have to raise 
to light and put into order the material there won 
for his colossal superstructure at London. Every- 
where in his dramas we find both the lore and the 
experience which he could have gleaned only in 
his small rural birth-town, where is to be found 
the communal germ of his entire later developed 
institutional world, or of the grand Shakespearian 
city in which all his characters live and move about 
with clash or concord. 

A basic and pervasive human experience, then, 
our future man-builder acquires in these prologu- 
ing years at Stratford. And here we may interject 
for our cognizant reader the reflection that Shake- 
speare had a supreme genius for experience, not 
simply for the getting of it, but for the using of it 
after it was gotten. "What he saw, felt, and suf- 
fered came to mean more and deeper in his case 
than in that of any other self-recording mortal, if 
his be the supreme writ, as is often stated. Other 
minds have wrought and endured profoundly and 
mightily, but somehow this existence of ours with 
its joys and sorrows has left its trail upon his soul 
so significantly and so creatively that his self-ex- 
pression in the word is often declared the highest 
yet uttered by man. And has not the recent world- 
war with its Anglo-Saxon primacy given us a new 
commentary on Shakespeare? For somehow we 



24 SRAKESPE ABE'S LIFE-DBAMA 

turn to him more than ever as our greatest repre- 
sentative, who is still to "show the very age and 
body of the time his form and pressure." 

At present, however, we are to watch him as a 
youth and catch him, when we can, gathering those 
personal experiences which hereafter he is to forge 
into characters who marvelously begin to speak and 
act on the spot in their own right. What he as an 
individual did and suffered, became at his creative 
touch another individual doing and suffering, not 
as a mortal like himself, but now overmade to an 
immortal and a dweller in the eternal city once 
called daringly Shakespearopolis. Then he was 
endowed also with the transcendent power of utter- 
ing himself at the top of human speech, which like- 
wise has the magic gift of never dying. Accord- 
ingly at Stratford we shall try to sleuth him get- 
ting those elementary and often crude experiences, 
both outer and inner, which he is hereafter to 
transfigure into the poetry of his Life-drama. 

William Shakespeare the Great (for there were 
seemingly dozens of other little William Shake- 
speares scattered through Warwickshire and the 
neighboring shires of England) was born April 
23rd, 1564, which date of his nativity is not exactly 
verifiable, but has been generally accepted, in a 
spirit of universal compromise on a shadowy point. 
The parish register records that he was baptized 
April 26th, 1564, a rite which usually, but by no 
means always, took place three days after birth. 
The Latinized entry for that day still runs read- 



THE STBATFOBD YOUTH 25 

able: GuUelmus, filius Joannis Shakspere. And 
another little slip in old Time's calculation should 
not be wholly forgotten by our celebrants of Shake- 
speare 's birth-day. The Grregorian calendar was 
not adopted in England till 1752, according to 
which we would have to add ten days to bring the 
23rd of April 1564 (Old Style) to its right date. 
Hence Shakespeare's birth really, according to the 
Sun's faultless chronometer, must have happened 
on the 3rd of May 1564. 

The parents of this William Shakespeare bore 
the names of John Shakespeare, and Mary Arden 
(Shakespeare), both of whom came of families 
having a distinctive character and genealogy, 
which will also have to be looked into. Their home 
was Stratford on the Avon, a rather diminutive 
town of Warwickshire in the West of England, 
once on the Welsh frontier and still not so very 
far from it — a significant fact in our poet's Life- 
drama. Perhaps, too, he had a drop of Welsh 
blood in his own veins, despite his robust Anglo- 
Saxonism. Here he lived till he was twenty-one 
years old — a time of multiform preparation and 
presage, hence we caption it a Prologue, overtur- 
ing his future career. Or we may deem it the im- 
plicit, the potential, the germinal stage of the man's 
total fulfilment. 

This Stratford in the middle of the sixteenth 
century is reported a prosperous market-town, with 
a number of small local industries and with its 
own civic life and character, having its prom- 



26 SHAKESPEABE'S LIFE-DBAMA 

inent parish ehureh and guild-hall, and also high- 
school. Evidently a town with its own distinctive 
psychology. But the statement must be added 
that it possessed little or no power of growth ; two 
centuries later it contained about the same number 
of inhabitants as in Shakespeare's time, hovering 
around 2000, with fluctuations of fortune up and 
down. In the year 1590, when our poet was living 
in London, the officials of Stratford complained 
that their town had fallen much into decay from 
the loss of trade. Probably this was one reason 
why Shakespeare left it as soon as he became of 
age, having stored up much life-stuff for his com- 
ing Pan-drama. 

In fact such a community had a very important 
part in the youthful training of the poet. It may 
well be deemed one of the representative civic 
atoms of which all England is composed, being that 
primal institutional home of hers, in whose bosom 
her greatest man was born and reared. Its influ- 
ence can be seen streaming through all his works, 
imparting to them its local color as well as its 
social character, along with traits of its people. 
And once he seems to pick it up almost bodily and 
put it into one of his plays, though he there calls 
it Windsor in a kind of comic disguise. The fact 
is that Shakespeare communed with and got to 
know the soul of England through atomic Strat- 
ford better than through massive London, which, 
however, is to be the scene of his manhood's self- 
realization. 



THE SHAKESPEABES 27 

Another fact which this boor, is going to empha- 
size about Stratford is, that t had long been a 
border settlement of Anglo- Sa> ondom in the lat- 
ter 's advance against the Celts of Wales and 
Western Britain. Some such position the town had 
once occupied for hundreds of years, and the mem- 
ory thereof was still alive and at work in the poet's 
youth. Thus he drank of the spirit of that strong 
persistent drive of the Anglo-Saxon to the west- 
ward, which in his time was just beginning to push 
out to America, and which had already settled 
Jamestown in Virginia, and which has since his 
day rolled across the whole Western Continent 
from Ocean to Ocean. Many towns in the Missis- 
sippi Valley have a frontier history which is not 
dissimilar to that of Stratford, though not so aged, 
and which still lies back in their memory and 
forms a unique strand of their character. Thus 
they may well find in Shakespeare a phase of their 
own vivid experience, which has not yet become 
altogether obliterated even in England. The very 
name of the poet's family has in it a memento of 
border warfare, if we with alert eyes glance back 
into its history. 

I. 

The Shakespeares. 

May we not catch already a note of defiance, if 
not a downright challenge to combat, in this cap- 
tion which designates seemingly a brood or clan of 



28 SEAEESPEABE'S LIFE-DBAMA 

spear-shakers, who leach back with their peculiar 
weapon long before musket and gun powder? At 
any rate some suc^!. conception must have been in 
the mind of Edmund Spenser, famous Elizabethan 
cotemporary, who, wishing to compliment his sing- 
ing comrade on what he probably knew would 
tickle family pride, selected just this war-tuned 
name for his praise, and hailed the poet 

Whose Muse full of high thought's invention 
Doth like himself, heroically sound — 

which allusion, though nameless, is supposed to be 
applicable only to Shakespeare. 

Nor should we fail to recall ancient Homer who 
glorifies with a like epithet his Achaean heroes be- 
fore Troy, as they on the bloody bridge of war 
would brandish their lances against the foe. And 
Hesiod, Aeschylus, and others sing their literal 
Greek Shakespeare (dorussoos) not as poet, how- 
ever, but as fore-fighter with spear in hand. Well 
does the English antiquarian Camden say that 
people often derive their names from what they 
wear and work in. Hence probably the enormous 
vogue of our English name Smith. So we read 
that in ancient English documents are found such 
appellatives as Longsword, Broadspeare, and even 
Pope Breakspeare (Nicholas) of historic fame, as 
well as Henry Shakelance and Hugh Shakeshaft. 
So we may listen for a moment to these "heroical 
sounds" echoing over and about our poet's 
patronymic. 



TEE SHAKESPEABES 29 

The name Shakespeare, usually deemed good 
Saxon by derivation, is said to be found even in 
Kent, perhaps not so very far from where the 
savage Hengst, the first Teuton invader of Britain, 
landed and began his march toward the West, 
which by the way is still going on. It seems to 
occur sporadically throughout England, till War- 
wickshire, which faces the old Welsh borderland, 
is reached, where the Shakespeares abound exceed- 
ingly, most of them without any known kinship to 
one another. They appear to shoot up copiously 
and quite spontaneously along that advancing 
Saxon line, which must have been at first largely 
composed of valorous spear-shakers. So we may 
revive here at the start the war-like suggestion 
which the name of Shakespeare called up in the 
minds of his cotemporaries. Beside Spenser al- 
ready cited, Ben Jonson has celebrated Shake- 
speare 's well-filed poetic lines 

In each of which he seems to shake a lance, 
As brandished at the eyes of ignorance — 

wherein the name again furnishes the threatening 
image of combat. 

Next the question arises: At whom was shaken 
this multitudinous array of spears appallingly 
reaching far backward in time, as well as now 
strung along the western English boundary? Only 
one answer possible: against the Celt, specially of 
the Welsh frontier. And while we are dallying 
over etymologies we may take the time to add that 



30 SHAKESPE ABE'S LIFE-DBAMA- 

the very word Welsh is still a German-Saxon term 
signifying a foreigner, one not of our stock or race, 
and was doubtless flavored originally with a spice 
of soldierly contempt. In fact the Teuton of. to- 
day who knows nothing of Cambrian "Wales, still 
uses the same word (Walsch) for non-German 
neighboring peoples, such as the Italian, the Slav, 
even the Frenchman. And their to him strange 
speech he will scorn as a kind of Welsh (Kauder- 
walsch). On the other hand an indignant Celt 
(Mackay) has taken his etymological revenge by 
turning the name Shakespeare into Celtic, deriving 
it from two words meaning Longshanks, possible 
eponym for a good runner, perchance fleeing from 
his Celtic foes. 

It has always seemed rather wonderful to us 
that English writers should claim that their great 
poet was born in the heart of England, with the 
inference that on this account he knows all about 
the English heart, whereof springs his charac- 
teristic genius. But the map and especially history 
show that Stratford on the Avon lies not so very 
far from the dividing line between Wales and 
England, ancient racial foes, and not yet fully 
reconciled, if we may judge by the recent Welsh 
patriotic Renaissance. Stratford was still some- 
what of a border town in Shakespeare's time, and 
he reveals in numerous passages of his dramas 
traces of the old race feeling which he must have 
caught and brought from his home-town and its 
surroundings. In fact, Stratford itself, we are 



THE STTAKESPEAEES 31 

told, had a considerable Welsh population, and 
many of mixed blood, since along that border the 
two peoples had been commingling for long cen- 
turies. Some have spied a Celtic blood corpuscle 
in Shakespeare himself, trickling into his heart and 
even into his imagination from some remote an- 
cestor, possibly already from his grandmother. 
Generally the barbarous invader would slay or 
drive oif the native man, and marry the native 
woman — a process which had been for generations 
going on around Stratford. 

There is no doubt, however, that Shakespeare 
sided in sympathy with the Saxons, one of whom 
he deemed himself, as we may infer from the num- 
ber of portraits he has painted of "Welshmen, 
mostly with a dash of grotesque if not contemptu- 
ous humor. See for instance Sir Hugh Evans in 
Merry Wives of Windsor and Fluellen in Henry Y. 
But for a type of the warlike spirit along that 
borderland, we may take the poet's description of 
the furious duel between English Mortimer and 
Welsh Glendower on the shore of the Severn, 
which river was long regarded as a kind of divid- 
ing line between Celt and Saxon, and flowed not so 
very far away from Stratford. But just behold 
our Mortimer, now the Saxon hero : 

On gentle Severn's sedgy bank 
In single opposition, hand to hand. 
He did confound the best part of an hour 
In changing hardiment with great Glendower. 



32 SHAKESPE ABE'S LIFE-DEAMA 

Three times they breathed, and three 

times did they drink 
Upon agreement of swift Severn's flood 
Blood-stained with these valiant com- 
batants. 

Here we may well feel the Shakespearian throb of 
the old conflict not far from the poet's fire-side, 
where he must have often heard the story told 
with an epic fervor, which he here reproduces (in 
First Henry IV). But, on the other hand, the 
typical fact must not be neglected that just this 
fighting English Mortimer, his people's hero, mar- 
ries his desperate Welsh foe's daughter, though 
she cannot talk her husband's language to do the 
courtship. In fact this drama (The First 
Henry IV) overflows with the warlike enthusiasm 
of the struggle on the English and Welsh frontier, 
being the poet's own neighborhood laden with all 
the vivid memories of his youth. One reason why 
the Second Henry IV droops in its thrill is that 
the scene moves North away from Shakespeare's 
juvenile range around Stratford. 

So much meaning we have to attach to our poet 's 
name derived from the advancing spear-shakers 
along the border — Saxons labeling themselves 
after their chief business. Says Sir Sidney Lee, 
good for statistics, whatever we may think of his 
esthetics, as he epitomizes the foregoing facts: 
''In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the 
surname (Shakespeare) is found far more fre- 



TEE SEAKESPEABE8 33 

quently in Warwickshire than anywhere else 
. And among them all William was a com- 
mon Christian name." 

Another indication that Shakespeare took a pro- 
nounced public pride in his spear-shaking ancestry, 
is the fact that the draft of the coat-of-arms for his 
father (which he applied for in 1596) contains as 
its most distinctive mark "a spear gold steeled," 
doubtless emblematic of his name and family. 
Moreover in said draft it is declared as a ground 
for such honor that the applicant's ancestors 
''were for their valiant and faithful service ad- 
vanced and rewarded by the most prudent prince 
King Henry the Seventh." This attempt to ob- 
tain heraldic glory cost the poet a good deal of 
time and trouble, whereof the account can be found 
in the antiquarians by any reader who wants such 
details. Here we would merely note that our 
Spear-shaker employs the weapon of his name 
as the blazon of his title to the rank of a gentleman. 

And while the etymological fit is on, we may as 
well give to it a little more vent by saying that 
this common cognomen William has also a warlike 
strain in its origin, being ancient Teutonic Wille- 
helm, whose two constituent words are will and 
helmet, both of which have never lapsed in modern 
English or in modern German. Thus we may feel 
from afar the original fondness of those old Saxon 
spear-shaking borderers for naming their boys 
William, that is, will-helmeted, or pluck-protected. 
So the live reader of William Shakespeare may feel 



34 SHAKESPE ABE'S LIFE-DBAMA 

a bright streak of satisfaction in tracing the gene- 
alogy even of the poet's name, hinting as it does 
his prime elemental energy poured forth not now 
in war but in writ, and after its way heroizing him 
as the "Will-helmeted Spear-shaker. No little of 
this original ancestral strength and clash he 
mightily exploits in his dramas, specially in his 
tragedies. 

That Shakespeare was attached to his name and 
fondled it poetically may be seen in several of his 
word-teasing sonnets (135-136) in which he caresses 
his abbreviation Will, and dances it very willfully 
up and down through a number of meanings. In- 
deed he puns with it a kind of sportive hide-and- 
seek, which often leaves the reader uncertainly 
groping through a labyrinthine word-play between 
the proper name Will and the common noun will, 
as for instance in the overture 

Whoever hath her wish, thou hast thy Will 
And Will to boot, and Will in overplus : 
Wilt thou whose will is large and spacious 
Not once vouchsafe to hide my will in thine? 

Strangely he celebrates his Dark Lady as having 
a greater Will than his own, as "being rich in 
Will" to which he is the submissive thrall. And 
his final supplication (136) turns on his dear 
name: 

Make but my name thy love, and love that still 
And then thou lov'st me, for my name is Will. 



THE SHAKESPEABES 35 

Nor should we forget to remark that these fore- 
mentioned numerous William Shakespeares in and 
around Stratford and its borderland were some- 
times mistaken one for the other, thus producing 
confusion in business and in intercourse through 
similarity of names. In fact such instances of 
confusion are of record. Hence it is not unlikely 
that our young Stratforder, William Shakespeare 
in his own person, may have experienced more 
than one case of mistaken identity somewhat 
similar to that of the two Antipholuses or of the 
two Dromios in Comedy of Errors, often supposed 
to be his first play. So this comedy, deemed im- 
probable by Coleridge, can well have been directly 
transcribed, at least in part, from the youth 's daily 
book of life. 

Shakespeare repeatedly pokes his good-natured 
jibes at the Welshman who is talking English ; thus 
the dramatist we overhear portraying scenes taken 
from the streets of Stratford or from its school, 
which once had a Welsh master. But by way of 
reparation, perhaps unconscious, he makes Welsh 
Owen Glendower a poet, and a Shakespearian poet 
at that, though with a decided Welsh mythical 
streak mingled with ridiculous superstitions. Per- 
haps we here may catch Shakespeare reproducing 
in Glendower the weird Celtic imagination, whose 
strains the youth must have heard often at Strat- 
ford, in contrast with English Hotspur, who is 
also a poet in speech and conception, though he 
denies it and scoffs at such a talent. But Glen- 



36 SHAKESPEABB'S LIFE-DBAMA 

dower takes as much pride in his poetic as in his 
martial prowess: 

I framed to the harp 
Many an English ditty lovely well, 
And gave the tongue a helpful ornament — 
A virtue that was never seen in you. 

So Shakespeare sets up a little Welsh-English 
eisteddfod or tournament of fantasy between the 
two imaginative warriors, the Welshman and the 
Englishman, as if preluding the tug of battle. 

Still Shakespeare was careful not to carry his 
fun too far there in London, since suspicious 
Queen Elizabeth was herself of Welsh blood. 
Then, too, her dynasty bore a Welsh name, being 
derived from Owen Tudor, husband or lover (for 
the relation seems somewhat doubtful) of Queen 
Catherine, widow of Henry V, our poet's chief 
historical hero among English Kings, who also de- 
clares in the play named after him : "I am Welsh, 
good countryman. ' ' Elizabeth would naturally 
not want too much said about the origin of her 
House or of herself. Less than a century before 
the birth of Shakespeare, Henry VII ends the 
wars of the Roses by his victory over Eichard III 
at Bosworth Field (1485), and enthrones the 
House of Tudor, which lasts till the death of 
Queen Elizabeth (1603). At this time, however, 
the poet had transcended the period of his writing 
English Histories, and was voicing his tumultuous 
heart out of its tragic depths. Moreover, during 



TEE SEAKESPEABES 37 

the present Tudor era, the border feud was more 
quiescent, and Wales could glorify itself peacefully 
over England, to which it now furnished the 
sovereign. 

In these more tranquil years intercourse between 
the two peoples would improve, and we can 
imagine the young inquisitive Shakespeare leaving 
his native valley for a trip over the border, cross- 
ing the Severn and the "Wye, scene of many former 
spear-shakings like that between Mortimer and 
Glendow^r. Thence he would penetrate the lonely 
Welsh mountains where he might behold the scen- 
ery of Cymheline and inspect the cave of Belarius. 
Why should he not proceed to Milford Haven^ 
then the chief seaport of Wales, with its various 
historic associations? For it is our belief that he 
needs and seeks, first of all for his creativity, the 
sense-basis of the thing immediately seen and ex- 
perienced, which he then transmutes into poetry. 

Here we are led to ruminate the wondering 
question: Did the youth Shakespeare in his 
neighborhood rambles ever visit Caerleon on the 
Usk, the famous Welsh home of Arthur and the 
Knights of the Round Table? This brings up one 
striking omission or silence in Shakespeare 's works, 
so striking that it must mean intentional avoidance 
if not downright repugnance. He could not help 
often hearing, during his boyhood along the border, 
about the Arthurian legend, the most creative and 
the most lasting product of the Welsh, possibly of 
the whole Celtic mind. But not one of his acknowl- 



38 SHAKESPEABE'S LIFE-DBAMA 

edged plays or poems is devoted to any hero of the 
Round Table, whose tale is supposed to have been 
located in Welsh Caerleon, a short journey from 
Stratford. Shal^espeare, so deeply imbued with 
the world's mythical spirit in its Anglo-Saxon and 
Greco-Roman manifestations, seems to shun the 
Celtic Mythus, which spread over England, and 
indeed over Europe, taking lodgment in far-off 
Teutonic and Mediterranean lands, and reproduce 
ing itself in many forms of poetry with little inter- 
ruption down time, for it is famously alive to-day 
in English Tennyson and in German Wagner, as 
it was already long ago in Italian Dante, not to 
speak of old Gottfried von Strassburg. Only a 
few brief allusions — some of these contemptuous 
and others suspected — does the greatest British 
poet suffer himself to utter in reference to the 
greatest, most productive British legend. 

This fact has long since seemed to us very sig- 
nificant. Shakespeare, lover of folk-lore and one 
of its supreme poetizers, turns away from the 
grandest manifestation of it just in his own neigh- 
borhood, where its glory once rose in full splendor, 
and its famous feats of war and love were certainly 
familiar to him from childhood. How can this be 
accounted for? In our judgment we have here an 
indication of that deep-seated racial antipathy 
which necessarily grew up along the fighting bor- 
derland between Welshman and Englishman, or 
more generally stated, between Celt and Saxon. Do 
we not see it still to-day furiously at work in Ire- 



TET: 8EAKE8PEAEE8 39 

land, with echoes across the Ocean through all 
America? So the new spear-shaker Shakespeare 
shakes his intellectual spear at the old Celtic 
fortress over the Severn, where was fabled the 
Table Round. And when the bristling forays are 
no longer permitted, he fires his sneer at "the 
dreamer Merlin and his prophecies. ' ' Or take that 
unique consolation of the tavern's hostess over the 
passing of Falstaff : ''Nay, sure, he's not in Hell; 
he's in Arthur's bosom, if ever man went to 
Arthur 's bosom. ' ' I fancy that young Shakespeare 
first heard this expression in a border pothouse, 
whose Welsh barmaid naturally substituted the 
Cymric hero Arthur for the Hebrew Father 
Abraham (Henry V, 113). 

The Spear-shakers, or the Shakespeares, when 
the long border conflict had grown flaccid, lapsed 
into peaceful plebeian tillers of the soil, tradesmen, 
and artisans. John Shakespeare, the poet's father, 
was born at Snitterfield (very Teutonic word 
still), a village some miles north of Stratford, 
where he was a farmer; but about 1551 he moved 
to Stratford, then a thriving market-town where 
he engaged in business with success at first, but 
after some years a slow adversity overtook him 
and ground him finally to very dust of poverty. 
From this descent into indigence he seems never 
to have recovered, though he rose to be in title an 
English gentleman blazoned with a coat-of-arms, 
through his illustrious son. 

But John Shakespeare's supreme deed, done at 



40 SHAKESPE ABE'S LIFE-DBAMA 

the height of his prosperity in 1557, was his win- 
ning the heart and hand of Mary Arden, daughter 
of a well-to-do land-owner of Wilmcote, three miles 
from Stratford, to whom his father was a tenant. 
This woman was her husband's superior in station 
and wealth, and doubtless also in native talent, 
good-breeding, and education. Thus dawns upon 
history this new Mary, mother of William Shake- 
speare, the most important personality in his early 
training, and without question the right parent of 
his genius. 

II. 

The Ardens. 

After a general way it may be affirmed that the 
Ardens were the more aristocratic of blood and 
breeding, while the Shakespeares were the more 
plebeian. In the name of Arden there lurks a sug- 
gestion of Norman French origin, since it brings 
to mind the region of Ardennes in France and 
also in French Belgium. Then there was the 
actual Forest of Arden, a woody tract of Warwick- 
shire which extended to the Avon, and lay not far 
from Stratford. But best known is the idyllic, 
quite Utopian Forest of Arden, with its bright 
heroine Rosalind in As You Like It. Let us note, 
however, that John Shakespeare, son of an humble 
farmer, won the hand of his overlord's daughter, 
Mary Arden, who had been reared in comfort for 
that time, if not in luxury. She doubtless had 



TEE ABDENS 41 

some education, at least that of the better class of 
young women of her social rank. Existing docu- 
ments show that she made her mark instead of 
signing her name; but that need not imply that 
she was unable to write her signature, so anti- 
quarians tell us. People who well knew how to 
subscribe their autograph, often simply put their 
mark on legal instruments. John Shakespeare, the 
father, a business man and keeper of accounts, is 
doubtless an example of the same fact. He could 
write, though we meet with his letterless sign. 

Moreover, Mary Arden brought to her husband 
considerable property. At her father's death in 
1556, and hence a year before her marriage, she 
fell heir to a handsome sum of ready money and 
a good piece of land with farm-house called 
Asbies. Besides this portion she had previously 
acquired an interest in two homesteads with ad- 
joining acres at Snitterfield. Thus she lifted her 
husband to the rank of an English landowner. It 
would seem that she, the youngest of seven daugh- 
ters, was the favorite of her father, who probably 
had not permitted her to grow up unlettered, as he 
made her one of his executors. Surely rustic John 
Shakespeare was in luck when he won to marriage 
well-dowered Mary Arden, who must have felt love 
to wed the man beneath her in wealth, blood, social 
position, and doubtless in education, not to speak 
of talent. On the whole a rather unconventional 
un-English act it was, which the poet Shakespeare 
has often repeated in bis plays. This disparity be- 



42 SHAKESPE ABE'S LIFE-DBAMA 

tween his two parents the keen-witted boy must 
have noticed long before he quit home. In fact 
it became more and more deeply stamped upon 
his mind, and therewith doubtless upon his feel- 
ings, as he marked his father's continual sub- 
sidence and his mother's devotion and steadfast- 
ness. Will this impressive home-felt experience in 
regard to the man and the woman nearest to his 
head and heart, show itself hereafter when the 
poet constructs his gallery of human characters 
made up of the two sexes? We shall often notice 
that what he has personally experienced is the 
chief original content which he pours into his ac- 
quired poetic forms, dramatic or lyric. 

Accordingly it may be here foresaid that the son 
William Shakespeare, in a number of his portraits 
has made his women-lovers the heroines of the ro- 
mance, while his men-lovers are rather an inferior 
set. Compare Portia with her Bassanio, Rosalind 
with her Orlando, Helena with her Bertram, even 
Juliet with her Eomeo. To the woman he gives 
the will, aye the will to love, and to take the eon- 
sequences. I believe that the youth Shakespeare 
saw the counterpart of this distinction between the 
woman and the man in his o^^ii home for many 
years; the woman was the better man of the two, 
and especially the stronger in love. Besides, John 
Shakespeare not long after his marriage began to 
droop in business, and for years he continued to 
be a sinking man, till he lost not only his own but 
his wife's property, which she apparently surreu- 



THE AKDENS 43 

dered to stem his downward fortune. The boy- 
must have seen and felt this decline of his father 
during his entire growth to manhood. Hence it 
lay in him to stamp upon many a play that the 
woman has more character than the man, that the 
female is made of better stuff than the male. Such 
was his daily experience in his own household. 

Pointedly the thought emerges from the circum- 
stances that Mary Arden Shakespeare was the 
parent. of her son's genius, and not only that but 
also she was the one who fostered its aspiration, 
supported its schooling, and helped it to its oppor- 
tunities. She had six sisters, and they also would 
have their influence on the bright boy, when he 
would visit their homes. Manifestly the aristocratic 
family of the Ardens with its traditions, with its 
long genealogy, with its prides and prejudices, 
which he failed not to hear from these six aunts, 
especially from the two unmarried ones, was dom- 
inant in the boyhood of the poet, while the some 
what plebeian Shakespeares would tend to fall into 
the background. For the old maid, as we may still 
hear her call herself in honor, banquets festively 
from the genealogical table. More than likely the 
Arden women had always deemed sister Mary's 
marriage as a mesalliance. Thus environed and 
trained, the original Shakespeare of the people gets 
for life an aristocratic tinge, often traceable in his 
work, and sometimes made a subject of democratic 
reproach to his book. 

Another note must be penned in this connection. 



44 SHAKESPE ABE'S LIFE-DBAMA 

Robert Arden, father of Mary, shows by the word- 
ing of his will drawn in November 1556 that he, 
if not a Catholic, was at least Catholicising. A 
different branch of the Arden family furnished its 
martyr to Elizabethan persecution of the old faith 
in 1583. From these and other facts the question 
has been mooted whether Shakespeare's mother 
was secretly a Catholic, and perchance her son as 
well. She seems to have adjusted herself to the 
church of her husband in her marriage, and prob- 
ably kept shy of breaking with the established re- 
ligion, which was Henry the Eighth's Protest- 
antism. Shakespeare doubtless felt somewhat of 
these religious counter currents in his family, and 
became careful and tolerant toward both sides, so 
his home-life probably showed a compromise of si- 
lence on the great church-dispute of the age, which 
grew to be his mind's habit. Then his nature was 
not that of a reformer or religious martyr, though 
he in his way partook of the deepest spiritual move- 
ment of his time, and felt as his own its collision, 
as we may note in his Hamlet. He could, however, 
have hardly been a convinced Catholic, if his char- 
acters expressed his honest conviction as regards 
the Papacy in King John, and as regards monasti- 
cism in Measure for Measure. Consider also the 
drift of his evident familiarity with tlie Genevan 
Protestant version of the Bible. Shakespeare's re- 
ligion has been much discussed in these recent 
years, and he has been claimed to be both a Ro- 
manist and a Puritan, as well as the Colossus 



THE ABDENS 45 

straddling both the religious extremes of his time. 
But an extremist he never was and could not be, 
except in poetry; hostile to neither side, yet shar- 
ing in both, he lived the whole and then portrayed 
it wholly. 

The poet's most distinctive monument to his 
mother is the character of Volumnia in his Corio- 
lanus, the aristocratic woman with her class preju- 
dice and strong will, and especially proud of her 
illustrious son who has achieved such lofty 
eminence. This play was written about the time 
of her death in 1608, perhaps not long afterward, 
under the spur of affectionate retrospect. It is 
doubtful if he ever paid any such tribute in his 
works to his father, who died in 1603. Shakespeare 
has limned quite a list of mothers through his 
dramas, both good and bad, in a variety of shad- 
ings. Unforgettable is the passionate motherhood 
of Constance in King John, yet subtly commingled 
with her own political ambition ; on the other hand 
Hermione, though also a queen, is wholly mother 
and wife. Wicked maternity may be graded from 
Hamlet's mother down through Cloten's to 
Sycorax, "the damned witch" whose offspring 
was Caliban. But the poet, has excluded the 
mother from his most terrible tragedies, King Lear, 
and Othello, in which the daughters have the 
stress, though these are wives also. The tragic 
mother. Lady Macbeth, can fling under foot her 
motherhood for ambition's sake, and demonically 
exclaim 



46 SHAKESPEABE'S LIFE-DBAMA 

Come to my woman's breasts, 
And take my milk for gall, you murdering 

ministers — 

I have given suck and know 
How tender 'tis to love the babe that 

milks me; 
I would, while it was smiling in my face, 
Have plucked my nipple from his boneless 

gums. 
And dashed its brains out — 

to win a sovereignty other than the maternal. 
Cleopatra, also a tragic mother, who yields up 
motherhood to passion, says at the last pinch of 
fate 

My resolution's fixed and I have nothing 

Of woman in me — 

and hence nothing of the mother. Still, as she 
takes the venomous asp to her bosom, caressingly 
she fondles it in memory of her blessedest mo- 
ment: 

Dost thou not see my baby at my breast 
That sucks the nurse to sleep? 

So she approaches death with a flash of maternal 
instinct breaking up from her deeper heart. But 
her final word turns back to her Eoman lover, her 
greatest conquest : ' ' Antony — What should I 
stay" — whereupon she passes beyond. 

There is no doubt that Shakespeare's mother 
traiisferred to her own family the refinement, the 



TRE ABDENS 47 

good-breeding and the culture of the Ardens 
Through all the ups and downs of her husband, 
she doubtless kept her home-life intact for her 
children. Can we construe some traits of the son 
from what the mother must have imparted to him 
in his youth? First, as already noted, he unques- 
tionably derived from her the aristocratic bent 
which we find in his works. The family tree of the 
Ardens could not help flowering in that household. 
She probably inducted him first into the child's 
storyland, for the woman is the natural depository 
of the fairy-tale, ballad, popular song, and folk- 
lore generally, which are ever recurrent in Shake- 
speare's plays. Whence else did he first catch this 
bit of floating legend : 

that it could be proved 
That some night-tripping fairy had exchanged 
In cradle-clothes our children where they lay. 
And called mine Percy and his Plantagenet ! 

The stories and the expressions of Scripture, 
with which he shows such familiarity, he probably 
heard first at his mother's knee. If the Volumnia 
of Coriolanus pictures her influence, Shakespeare 
was spiritually much more of an Arden than of a 
Shakespeare. We have to think him altogether 
more deeply mothered in his home-life than 
fathered, and the boy could not help feeling it 
thoroughly. The coat of arms which the poet ob- 
tained for his father John Shakespeare belonged 
by mind's birthright to his mother Mary, whose 



48 SHAKESPE ABE'S LIFE-DBAMA 

family had also a coat of arms which the son sought 
official permission ''to impale" on that of his 
father, though seemingly an obstacle arose. 

The whole situation recalls that of Goethe, doubt- 
less the greatest literary genius since Shakespeare. 
How often have we during this narrative had to 
hum the lines in which the Weimar poet sings of 
his parentage with his soul's sweetest music: 

Vom Vater hab' Ich die Statur, 
Des Leben's ernstes Fiihren; 

Vom Miitterchen die Frohnatur, 
Die Lust zu fabulieren. 

These two traits, especially the latter, ''the delight 
in fabling", the Little Mother (Miitterchen) in 
both cases imparted to her like-minded son, who 
voiced it eternally in Literature. Each mother 
had the happiness of living to see her heart's own 
boy the greatest man of his age. But it must not 
be forgotten that each of these youths served up to 
his fond mother a domestic escapade which must 
have made her wince at the molt of young genius, 
and which has become world-famous in the lives of 
both poets. 

It is our opinion that the boy in a scene of Titus 
Andronicus (Act IV. se. 1.) reproduces certain do- 
mestic experiences of Shakespeare during his 
school-days. This was an early drama of the poet, 
some say his earliest, and his home-life plays 
through it (horrible as it otherwise is) in various 
ways. An aunt also is introduced into it who loves 



TRE ABDENS 49 

"me as dear as e'er my mother did," and she has 
also been a domestic teacher who 

hath read to thee 
Sweet poetry and Tully's orator. 

Nor is the mother herself left out, for when the 
question is asked of the boy, what book is that 
which he is reading? he replies, 

'Tis Ovid's Metamorphoses — 
My mother gave it me. 

This work of the Roman poet is known to have 
been Shakespeare's most congenial and most in- 
fluential school-book, since its poetic and mythical 
power over him can be traced not only in his earlier 
but also in his later productions, even till his last 
drama, The Tempest, whose lines beginning "Ye 
elves of hills" (V. 1.) are an vidian echo from 
Golding's translation of the Metamorphoses. 

But just now we may well be moved to take an- 
other brief glance at the significant maternal 
memento which bespeaks the timely present to the 
promising school-boy, whose words still breathe 
his affection for the giver: ''My mother gave it 
me. ' ' And what is more surprising, that very copy 
of Ovid may still exist with Shakespeare's signa- 
ture on the title. But where and when did he 
learn his Latin? 



50 SHAKESPH: ABE'S LIFE-DEAMA 

III. 

Shakespeare the School-Boy. 

It was one of the epochal days of his life when 
the little laddie Willie Shakespeare, aged seven, 
stepped across the threshold of the Stratford 
Grammar School, in which he was destined' to re- 
main Tinder instruction some six or possibly seven 
years (1571 till 1577-8). At this source he was 
to tap the fountain of the age 's culture ; how much 
did he drink? Some say, very little; others affirm 
that here he won the solid and lasting elements of 
all that classical lore with which his works from 
beginning to end are saturated. Indeed it would 
seem that the Baconian theory, which insists upon 
the learning of the author Shakespeare and the 
ignorance of the man (or actor) Shakesi^eare, 
must find its germinal starting-point in what the 
lad did acquire or could acquire in the Stratford 
Grammar School. 

Given the aspiring boy, with an unquestioned 
talent for assimilating quickly everything, with 
an incentive fostered at home especially by his 
mother, he being then at the most apperceptive and 
remembering time of life — what could he get, and 
what was his opportunity? We have before us his 
book called the Works of William Shakespeare, 
wherein the careful serutinizer, especially the 
open-eyed practical educator, with the aid of the 
few outside facts, can construe fairly well the chief 



SEAKESPEABE THE SCHOOL-BOY 51 

cultural winnings of the youthful poet during his 
school-years, from seven till thirteen or fourteen. 

Let us foresay, however, that this Stratford In- 
stitute had long been in existence, but had recently 
been remodeled and adjusted to the spirit of the 
age. The Renascence or the New Learning, as it 
was often Anglicised, had penetrated to the small 
town on the Avon, as well as to numerous other 
communities of England, and for that matter, of 
Europe. It was a time of spiritual uplift, both 
religious and secular; we may well think that a 
little jet of the World-Spirit had been turned on 
in that modest school-room, whereof the receptive 
youth unconsciously took a long full draught. Al- 
ready when he entered, the boy could read, and 
make figures, and probably write a little after the 
old English or German scri]3t. But the main study 
was Latin, then the mediating speech of cultured 
Europe, and more nearly the universal tongue of 
the Renascence than any other. 

It is evident that this course in Latin was very 
thorough. The main text-books which were used 
have been identified from the poet's allusions in 
his plays, and the method of instruction can also 
be made out from contemporary documents. It is 
said that the school opened at 6 A. M. and lasted 
till 5 :30 P. M., with intermissions for breakfast 
and dinner, and with a couple of shorter recesses 
for recreation. That is, the boy at school then had 
to do a day's work extending quite through ten 
hours, without counting the stops. What do pupils 



52 SHAKESPEARE'S LIFE-DBAMA 

and parents of onr time think of that? Then the 
chief study was Latin, Latin, Latin for dear life, 
as the great struggle of the age was to get hold of 
the implement which opened the road to the best 
thought of the past as well as of the present. The 
first educational duty of the still backward Eng- 
land was to connect with the whole stream of 
Mediterranean civilisation, and to partake of its 
highest spiritual fruitage, from ancient Greece and 
Rome down to modern Italy, to which can be ap- 
pended the other Latinized countries lil^e France 
and Spain. There is no doubt that Latin then was 
the chief literary conduit to the remoter European 
peoples, who partook of the new intellectual life 
known as the Eenascence. Hence we can under- 
stand the persistence, yea the desperation with 
which Latin was studied in all Teutonic countries 
of that time, which were then just emerging into 
their modern historic destiny. This school even 
emigrated with the English colonies to America in 
the Shakespearian era. 

It is evident that the youth Shakespeare during 
those years of his freshest acquisitive powers, could 
take up and inoculate his budding genius with the 
new spirit of the time, of which that Stratford 
Grammar School was a manifestation as well as an 
instrumentality. Ten hours a day for six or seven 
years between the ages of seven and fourteen ! The 
results of this considerable fragment of schooling 
can be traced in every drop of ink that ever flowed 
from his pen. To be sure, the bright boy often 



SHAKESPEABE THE SCHOOL-BOY 53 

wearied of the tedious drill which was probably 
necessary for the slower minds — that is the case 
still today. Nor did the merry lad have pleasant 
memories of his frequent trouncings, which the old 
pedagogues deemed the best medicine for mischief 
and even for mental backwardness, though the 
latter might have its source in a physical defect, 
bad eyes, for instance. Hence spring the rather 
ungracious slurs on schools and schoolmasters, of 
which quite a piquant anthology may be gathered 
from Shakespeare's writings. But the sufficient 
answer to himself is both the spirit and the knowl- 
edge which radiates everywhere from his pages. 

The language teacher of to-day will be inclined 
to hold that the method of instruction was more 
internally transforming, even more deeply edu- 
cative as far as it went, than that of our own time. 
For instance, those Stratford boys were taught not 
only to read Latin, but to speak it, and to under- 
stand it when spoken. Eye, ear and tongue were 
all practised together for winning a complete mas- 
tery over a foreign idiom. In our present Acade- 
mies, High Schools, and Colleges, the chief and 
often the sole exercise is to translate from the dead 
Latin text into deader English. But the school- 
boy Shakespeare was trained in Latin conversation, 
and, after a daily practice of several years not only 
in reading the language but in hearing it and speak- 
ing it, had a more intimate living acquaintance 
with its spirit and a greater command over its 
structure, than any pupil is likely to have who 



54 SHAKESPEABE'S LIFE-DRAMA 

is taught after the manner of to-day. A little 
Greek the master would naturally impart to the 
most promising pupil of his school, for even surly 
Ben Johson, and perhaps envious at times, plum- 
ing himself on his University erudition, confessed 
that Shakespeare had some Grreek though it was 
less than his ''small Latin." Still it is probable 
that Shakespeare's Hellenic studies never delved 
very deep into the original sources. 

It was chiefly the Latin poets who fed the boy's 
genius during his school-days. Ovid, Horace, 
Virgil were given in precious bits and even memo- 
rized; nor were the dramatists neglected — Seneca, 
Plautus, Terence. Cicero's prose, and Seneca's 
seemingly, would have its place in any curriculum 
of the Renascence. That impress of Latin verse, 
which can be traced in every poem Shakespeare 
ever wrote, could only have been given in early 
years at the Stratford School. And that subtle in- 
grained intimacy with the Latin idiom, so that he 
can often be detected transferring un-English 
Latin words and constructions off-hand into his 
English, was certainly gained in his juvenile 
studies. 

Perhaps we can j^ut our finger upon the actual 
classical book which he loved most and knew best, 
and which had the greatest influence over him — 
Ovid's Metamorphoses. This fact of him was 
recognized during Shakespeare's life-time by 
Francis Meres the critic, who speaks of "the sweet 
and witty soul of Ovid" as our poet's own; and 



SHAKESPEAEE THE SCHOOL-BOT 55 

Holof ernes, the schoolmaster in Love's Labor Lost, 
proclaims: ''Ovidius Naso was the man, and why 
indeed Naso (Nosey) but for smelling out the 
odoriferous flowers of fancy, the jerks of inven- 
tion?" Ovid's Metamorphoses is a vast handbook 
of Greek Mythology turned into flowing grateful 
Latin hexameters, and this book became Shake- 
speare's abounding quarry for the mythical lore 
strown all through his pages. Moreover Ovid be- 
longs to the ancient Latin Renascence of the 
Augustan age ; the Gods and their deeds are no 
longer objects of faith, but rather of amusement 
and of allegorical play. Ovid narrates Greek le- 
gends as entertaining, illustrative, fanciful litera- 
ture; in other words he is not primarily mythical 
but paramythical. Now Shakespeare uses the 
Greek Mythology in the same paramythical man- 
ner, which he doubtless caught and practised in his 
school-days. (See Goethe in the Second Part of 
Faust for the greatest modern paramyth-maker. ) 

Then again Ovid is the poet of love, and on this 
side touches a still deeper strand of affinity with 
the English poet. It is true that the Ovidian con- 
ception of love is relatively superficial, sensual, 
sportive — more that of a poetic stimulus or a 
pastime's plaything than of a mighty overwhelm- 
ing passion. Love does not use him, but he uses 
love. Very different is this from Shakespeare at 
his highest. Still the latter, in his early comedies, 
shows himself as more or less Ovidian in his 
amatory light-hearted outpourings. But when in 



56 SHAKESPEABE'S LIFE-DBAMA 

his Second Period, the Dark Lady gets her full 
clutch in his heart, the fun turns to an intense 
crushing earnestness and even suffering. Love is 
no longer a playful little Cupid, but a death-deal- 
ing Fury who smites even her strongest devotees 
right and left, making them tragic. Here we may 
observe that Ovid, though the favorite Latin 
reading-book in the schools of the Renascence and 
of the Middle Ages, has been quite banished from 
the secondary instruction of our modern time, or 
admitted only in an extremely jejune and expur- 
gated form. The far chaster Virgil has driven him 
out, since girls have been coming to classes in 
Latin along with the boys, and reading its litera- 
ture. But into the door of the Stratford Grammer 
School no maiden dared peep, though Portia of 
Venice knew Latin, and her like in such lore 
could have been found also in England. I cannot 
see much influence of Virgil permeating Shake- 
speare, in spite of some allusions, for instance to 
Dido's love and to the false Sinon. 

It may well be asserted, though the contrary 
opinion is usually held, that Shakespeare could 
have gotten, and probably did get, considerable 
training in the use of his native tongue at that 
school. Certainly there must have been a good 
deal of translation from Latin into the A^ernacular, 
by those Stratford school-boys. Many a turn of 
Golding's English version of Ovid's Metamor- 
phoses has been uncovered in Shakespeare, show- 
ing that he too had in the undergraduate's slang 



SEAEESPEABE THE SCHOOL-BOY 57 

a "pony" at hand probably, as Golding's book 
was popular, and ready for him, having been 
printed only four years before he entered school 
(1567). The curious fact has been dug up that 
Ovid's exquisite word Titania (with its dulcet 
syllables and even inner rhymes) is not found in 
Golding, who uses the title Diana instead, but is 
employed at first hand by Shakespeare, who could 
have met it only in the original Latin, and there 
have felt its subtle melody, almost making us hear 
the moonshine's music to which the fairies dance 
in Midsummer Night's Dream. 

Still further, Shakepeare's vernacular was 
deeply influenced by the English Bible, which was 
read in school and probably at his home. The ver- 
sion whicli he in one way or other appropriated 
was not that of King James, which did not appear 
till the poet's work was practically done (1611), 
but the Genevan version (1560). His poetry 
abounds in scriptural turns and allusions from be- 
ginning to end, showing that he was saturated with 
the Bible in his early years. Indeed all England 
was becoming in his time a people of one book, 
whose spirit and phraseology were taking posses- 
sion of the nation's soul. That book was the 
great religious folk-book of the ages, the two Hebrew 
Testaments, with which Shakespeare's very con- 
sciousness was thoroughly infiltrated, as recent 
authors have shown in hundreds of parallel pass- 
ages. Very suggestive is such a fact, proving that 
the universal poet had appropriated not only the 



58 SHAKESPEARE'S LIFE-DBAMA 

secular but the religious trend of his age. This 
is not saying that he was a learned theologian, or a 
violent sectary of any kind ; he went neither way 
to extremes. It is often stated that he was a de- 
cided anti-Puritan, but the passages cited from his 
works do not prove the assertion. And on the other 
hand he was not a strict Puritan nor anything 
fanatical (The recent book of the Rev. Thomas 
Carter, Shakespeare arid Holy Scripture, is not 
convincing at every point, but it shows overwhelm- 
ingly, yea surprisingly to many an old »Shake- 
spearian, how the poet was steeped through and 
through with biblical speech and spirit. He was 
like Croethe, hibelfest, as the Germans say — doubt- 
less in the main through his mother's influence). 

Thus Shakespeare could well have had some su- 
perb instruction in English from the printed page 
during his school years. The question will come up : 
How much better or worse is the modern profes- 
sorial way which rams down the pupil's throat a 
crystallized vernacular with little or no fluidity or 
elasticity ? Shakespeare himself has keenly satirized 
the pedantry of the linguistic pedagogues, whose 
trammels he must have already felt as a school-boy. 
To-day we flee back to his diction's freedom, for he 
keeps his language plastic, self -transforming, hence 
ever-young and ever-growing. The Olympian sov- 
ereignty over his mother-tongue may well be 
deemed one of Shakespeare's most masterful 
achievements, and it must have begun at school, 
though by no means confined to that one spot or to 



SEAKESPEABE THE SCHOOL-BOY 59 

any other. He seems to tap the creative source of 
all human speech, and to make it flow down into 
English, which, accordingly, in his work shines out 
as if new-made. In language as in other matters 
he shows his gift of transfiguration, the unique seal 
of his genius. Plot, character, story, word are all 
handed to him by time; but then just behold the 
grand metamorphosis ! 

Nothing of him that doth fade 
But doth suffer a sea-change 
Into something rich and strange. 

Somehow we cannot help thinking that the boy 's 
schoolmaster or one of the two (or perhaps three 
there were) must have been a personal influence in 
the poet's development, though no record gives us 
permission to say so. Simon Hunt, B. A., graduate 
of Oxford and hence a classical scholar of some at- 
tainments, is handed down as the principal of the 
school during five years of young Shakespeare's 
stay. Did that teacher not soon discern the 
brightest youth among his pupils and foster his 
talent with some special instruction, for which he 
certainly had time during those long dragging 
school-hours? Possibly he may have glimpsed in 
him the rising genius of the age, and nourished its 
peculiar bent by the tales of classic heroes, being 
himself a good story-teller gifted with imagination 
and humor. Such country schoolmasters of the old 
style we have seen here in our American West, 
who could tell again the tale of Troy to their boys 



60 SRAKESPEABE'S LIFE-DBAMA 

with the zest of an ancient Homeric rhapsode. One 
thing is certain : Shakespeare was veritably soaked 
in the antique Mythus, so that it became struc- 
tural in his brain-work, a living ingredient of his 
whole mental make-up. Where and how did he get 
it? Not after he went to London, he was then too 
busy and in fact too old; at Stratford was its 
original winning, being appropriated largely from 
the school and the schoolmaster there. So we dare 
think without specially documented proof. Then 
into this classical fund the quick-witted lad must 
have spun the native home-grown Mythus, which 
naturally flowed from the lips of the people at 
large and from his own home-folk, specially his 
mother and his aunts; six of the latter we must 
remember, two of them husbandless. 

Much valuable knowledge for his future career 
Shakespeare the school-boy must have gained dur- 
ing these years of youthful acquisition. But one 
book seems to stand out above all others for its com- 
patibility with his budding genius as well as for its 
permanent influence over his life : the already men- 
tioned Metamorphoses by the Roman poet Ovid. 
But Shakespeare must have felt something deeper 
in this book than the easy-sailing narrative, or the 
liquid hexametral verse, or even the golden cadence 
of its poetry, which his Holofernes so praises. He , 
foreboded his own deepest self in that idea of Meta- 
morphosis, the very potentiality of his coming 
genius. For is he not able to metamorphose him- 
self and his experience into all forms of humanity, 



SHAKESPEABE THE SCHOOL-BOT Ql 

into those hundreds of characters of his dramas, as 
if they were just his own manifold self-realisation ? 
It is true that one finds no such creative genius as 
Shakespeare in the personality of Ovid, far from 
it ; still there lies the deeper suggestion in that 
word Metamorphosis which the Roman poet picked 
up quite externally from Greek Mythology, and 
superficialized into little more than agreeable 
story-telling. Originally in the Hellenic mind it 
had a much profounder meaning which Shake- 
speare must have presaged as the genetic power 
underneath all these divine transformations. There 
seems to us already hinted in the process of Meta- 
morphosis that unique transfiguration of Man and 
the World, which we have already remarked as the 
most characteristic stamp of our poet 's genius. We 
may also dream, for it can do us no harm, that his 
mother divined some such endowment in her boy 
when she gave him a copy of just this book of 
Ovid, as already we have dramatically hearkened 
him saying: "My rnother gave it me." 

Let another little fact be here set down which 
the reader may cap out with some more of his 
dreamery, if he be in the mood. A copy of the 
famous Aldine (Venetian) edition of Ovid's Meta- 
morphoses printed in 1502 can be seen in the 
Bodleian library with an inscription on the title 
somehow thus: Wm. She., which certain experts 
affirm to be the poet's genuine hand-writing. Did 
he buy the work on his Italian trip at Venice, per- 
chance from some book-selling Aldus? Or is this 



62 SHAKESPEABE'S LIFE-DBAMA 

the very copy which already at Stratford the boy 
received from liis mother, who got it — whence? 
Enough. 

But now comes the cardinal fact that the school- 
boyhood of William Shakespeare is brought to 
close somewhat prematurely. It is conjectured 
that his father withdrew him from his studies and 
set him to work to help gain the family's liveli- 
hood. We question if this be the true reason. Our 
surmise is that Shakespeare of his own account quit 
school because he was dissatisfied with the new 
master, who had succeeded in 1577 his old and fa- 
vorite teacher, Simon Hunt. If the boy had wished 
to go on with his education, his mother and the 
Ardens would have certainly found the way. Such 
a change of instructors is still a source of school- 
leaving. Thomas Jenkins has been handed down 
as the name of the new master, who in a couple of 
years seems to have lost his position, as he was 
probably a misfit from the start. Doubtless too 
he was a Welshman, whose Latin is burlesqued in 
Merry Wives of Windsor. Some such unpleasant 
memory is the cause of Shakespeare's satirical por- 
traits of pedagogues in his earlier dramas, like that 
of Holofernes and his other pedants. And the 
school and the school-boy himself are not spared, as 
we can catch him limned in the well-known 
passage : 

. . the whining school-boy with his satchel 

And shining morning face, creeping like snail 

Unwillingly to school — 



SHAKESPEABE THE SCHOOL-BOY 63 

SO we may image the lad Willie Shakespeare, 
prompted by his mother, to saunter slowly down 
the Stratford street to the school-house, where 
rules the hated dominie, forule in hand, who may 
have flogged him the first day, the mischievous 
urchin and incipient dramatist full of young 
mockery, which pulses through his penpoint long 
afterwards into his London caricatures. 

What follows? I think we can detect the older 
reminiscent Shakespeare telling on his youthful self 
when he" makes the school-boy, after quitting his 
books, pass into the next stage, that of Nature's 
sensuous evolution : 

And then the lover, 
Sighing like a furnace, with a woeful ballad 
Made to his mistress' eyebrow. 

True certainly of Shakespeare now becoming the 
adolescent versifier. And so we have reached the 
passioning juvenile poet who begins to write tender 
love-rhymes in response to the elemental urge of 
early human emotion. Of course the songful heart 
of the lad just turning into his teens may have 
begun already at school to burgeon with little 
amatory versicles, to which both nature and art 
were giving him the inner push as well as the outer 
example. 

But the main point for his future unique great- 
ness is that the young Shakespeare, now at the 
most absorbent and apperceptive time of life, com- 
munes with and takes up into himself the primal 



64 SHAEESPE ABE'S LIFE-DEAMA 

race-eivilizing Mediterranean culture, both mythi- 
cal and historical, religious and secular. Classic and 
Hebrew, Heathen and Christian. Moreover he be- 
gins to fuse this Southern cultural strain of the 
noblest past with the Northern elemental energy of 
the outbursting Anglo-Saxon present, crude as yet 
but mightily creative. Indeed Shakespeare may be 
deemed the literary reconciler of Roma and Teu- 
tonia, otherwise so irreconcileable. For the recent 
world-war was at its start but another outbreak of 
the bi-millenial feud between the North and South 
of Europe, between the Teutonic and the Latin civ- 
ilisations, both of which William Shakespeare (as 
we shall often note hereafter) sought to take up 
into his personal culture, marrying them har- 
moniously in his art, and thereby expressing their 
unity throughout his Life-drama. 

IV. 

The Adolescent Shakespeare. 

After leaving school when he was thirteen or 
fourteen, there is a total gap in the record of his 
life which lasts some four or five years. Only one 
dubious and meagre anecdote told long afterwards 
by gossipy Aubrey fills the ominous vacancy, and 
thus it runs: Young Shakespeare is said to have 
assisted his father in the latter 's trade, which was 
then that of a butcher. Our informant adds, with 
a fabulous tinge: ''When he killed a calf, he 



TRE ADOLESCENT SHAKESPEABE. 65 

would do it in high style and make a speech." 
Possibly this is a popular echo of the boy's native 
bent toward the drama already manifesting itself 
in his daily task. 

The much deeper question, however, springs up : 
What salient experiences of life was the coming 
poet to get and to lay up from the time of his quit- 
ting school till his marriage, say from his four- 
teenth till his nineteenth year? The turning and 
trying period of youth is this in the development 
of the human being, both mentally and bodily; it 
is the transitional time of life's adolescence, when 
nature drives the incarnate person toward creation, 
and mind follows in nature 's wake. It becomes the 
starting-point of many activities, physical and 
spiritual; especially does the distinctive indi- 
viduality of the man now begin to test itself, and 
to grope about in its environment for its needed 
food. The adolescent Shakespeare must have 
started to show the original and originating 
Shakespeare, his mind would swell to bud forth that 
special form which it afterward matured, expand- 
ing to seek for those experiences which were fitted 
to nourish its growth. 

But now this capital stage of his evolution we are 
wholly to conjecture, inasmuch as it is rather the 
blankest chasm in Shakespeare's whole biography 
as far as documents are concerned. What then is 
to be done? We must construe these four or five 
years from what he knew and wrought in his later 
fulfilment; we can look from the height of the 



gg SHAKESPE ABE'S LIFE-DBAMA 

mountain and measure, in part at least, what lies 
at the base. Moreover adolescence has its common 
character, its general outline in all mankind, yea 
its principles which every man knows from his own 
experience and also from literature. 

I. We believe that he kept up his studies after 
quitting school, doubtless in a somewhat desultory 
way but still effective. Every ambitious boy would 
do so, has done so, and will do so again. Especially 
Latin, probably his favorite branch, never fell out 
of his mind; there is ample evidence that he knew 
it and read it after he went to London and became 
a writer of plays, in which work he shows his ac- 
quaintance, even if limited, with ancient Eoman 
Literature. Moreover he could easily obtain help 
at Stratford from the schoolmaster, from the 
clergyman, and from other educated people of the 
town and neighborhood, most of whom would nat- 
urally take an interest in the aspiring boy, who is 
seeking to improve himself under adverse circum- 
stances. Have we not all seen the same thing 
to-day, even in the frontier towns of America? 
Then the mother at home would certainly encour- 
age her promising son, especially as her other sons 
seem not to have shown any capacity or zeal for 
improvement. Hints of this maternal pride in 
himself the poet mirrored long afterward in 
Volumnia, mother of Coriolanus. Her family, the 
Ardens, well-off and influential, would not fail to 
give encouragement to the bright scion of the 
kindred. 



TBE ADOLESCENT SHAKESPEABE. 57 

John Shakespeare, the father, during these years 
was falling deeper and deeper into financial mis- 
fortune and personal insignificance. Moreover the 
town, Stratford, had become a sinking community, 
having lost slowly its former prosperity and im- 
portance. Young Shakespeare could not help 
observing this decline, and would turn for assist- 
ance to his mother and her wealthier people. Prob- 
ably John Shakespeare, rustic and plebeian, had 
small patience with the son's studies, and would 
crush him down into continuous hard work for the 
sake of wresting from his earnings a little more 
money. But the mother saw to it that her boy 
Willie had his chance. At least we dare so con- 
strue the relation in that family, even if the poet 
has left no such lasting poetic record of his father 
as of his mother. 

At this point we cannot help thinking of another 
great character, Abraham Lincoln, whose adolescent 
years were guarded for study by his mother (in 
this case, his step-mother) against the pressure of 
an unappreeiative father. In Herndon's report 
she is recorded as saying : "1 induced my husband 
to permit Abe to study at home as well as at school. 
At first he (the husband) was not easily reconciled 
to it, ' ' but she had her way. In that noisy Lincoln 
household ''we took particular pains not to disturb 
the boy — would let him read on and on till he quit 
of his own accord. ' ' If Abraham Lincoln, why not 
William Shakespeare? In fact Lincoln's oppor- 
tunities for education were far inferior, certainly 



68 SHAKESPEARE'S LIFE-DRAMA 

not a quarter of those of Shakespeare. Lincoln 
himself declared that "the aggregate of his school- 
ing did not amount to one year ' ', and that little in 
a remote backwoods school. The following bit is 
also from his pen: if a straggling teacher "sup- 
posed to understand Latin happened to sojourn in 
the neighborhood, he was looked upon as a wizard. ' ' 
Yet which of the two has written the more eternal 
English words: Shakespeare or Lincoln? The 
Tribunal of the Ages must wait a while to decide ; 
eternity is not here yet. 

II. During this time the investigating youth 
must have become acquainted with his environment 
— both his special community and the surrounding 
country. The processes of farm-life he picked up, 
and probably he took a hand in tilling the soil 
along with his father's people, the Shakespeares. 
That basic culture of society and also its poetical 
substrate, agriculture, we find ingrained both in 
his language and in his thought. Then the many 
festivities connected with rural life he must have 
seen and shared in, for we find them recurring 
with zest in his plays. He shows an intimate knowl- 
edge of sports — hunting, hawking, cock-fighting, 
bear-baiting; evidently he liked dogs and horses at 
first hand. Festivals also he would attend and ap- 
propriate as a poetic phase of his little world ; 
pageants, religious and secular, become a part not 
only of his knowledge but of his very consciousness 
during these years, and manifest their influence 
directly in his dramas till the close of his days. 



THE ADOLESCENT SHAKESPEAEE. Q() 



His calendar often recalled the saints and their 
days prescribed by the old church — St. George and 
the Dragon, Easter, Lammas tide. May-day with 
its pole and dance and poetry was one of his de- 
lights. From his allusions we know that he took 
pleasure in the tale of Robin Hood and the group 
of Outlaws who had fled to the forest, and he may 
have played or even dramatized the story in his 
youth. Doubtless from it he derived the first hint 
of that flight from society to the unsocial woods, 
which runs through so many of his plays; the 
adolescent evidently made his own this legend, once 
the most popular of rural England. Through the 
neighboring Forest of Arden he could ramble, 
and dream himself escaping from the troubles and 
wrongs of the town and home. And why should 
not his rambles have extended to the dreamy 
mountains of Wales, the right home of his elfin 
folks? So he must have won the creative experi- 
ence for that flight in his dramas to a primitive 
condition, or to an idyllic love-world, such as we 
see in his As You Like It. 

The negative or nether side of life he would 
curiously dip into during this inquisitive time. He 
doubtless came to know somewhat of every tap- 
room in little Stratford, and there were thirty of 
them, according to an accepted report. Crapulous 
Eastcheap of his London days the alert poetic ap- 
prentice glimpsed already at Stratford, along with 
Falstaff and his jolly crowd of bummers. The 
poet-haunted Mermaid, the London tavern of the 



70 SHAKESPEABE'S LIFE-DBAMA 

Muses, could hardly have shown him Sir Toby 
Belch and the gang of Falstaffian low-lived revelers, 
who belong to the Shakespearian universe, and to 
the Lord's also, it would seem. 

III. During these formative years young Shake- 
speare could have witnessed a good deal of acting 
by professional players. As yet the Puritan op- 
position to the drama had not overtaken Stratford, 
as it did later. In fact, several times in the course 
of the year different troupes would play at the 
town-hall. It may be said that the rising con- 
sciousness of England in its highest literary ex- 
pression was getting to be dramatic — which 
tendency in the boy was to culminate hereafter in 
the man Shakespeare. So this little speck of the- 
atrical Stratford in his evolution became a prepa- 
ration and a prophecy. 

Thus while these adolescent years ran on, there 
was enough opportunity for Shakespeare to find 
himself, to feel the innate bent of his own spirit 
which deeply partook of that of the age. Then he 
had some theoretic knowledge of the drama of the 
past ; comic Plautus he could well have read at the 
Stratford Grammar School, and perchance have 
dipped into tragic Seneca — both these Roman 
dramatists he designates in his Hamlet. Little the- 
atricals among the town 's people were not wanting, 
in response to the push of the time. Even "the 
rude mechanicals" of Midsummer Night's Dream 
the boy could easily have witnessed at Stratford in 
their suggestion if not in their crass reality. 



THE ADOLESCENT 8RAKESPEABE. 71 

It is, therefore, our view that Shakespeare began 
to feel his budding career in this open inquisitive 
adolescent period of life. In other words, he be- 
came desperately stage-struck, and never could 
again be at peace with himself, till he had done his 
duty toward the call of his genius by becoming a 
dramatist. Under this spur he finally pushed for 
London, and there he soon found his congenial en- 
vironment, whence he started upward. In fact 
adolescence is just the time for getting stage- 
struck in boy or girl, when nature makes her prime 
creative lurch both in body and mind, and drives 
toward her original gift's gratification. 

IV. There can be little doubt of his pushing to 
write in these tentative years. Along with the 
flowering of the poet's adolescence would come the 
intense desire for self-expression, especially in a 
creative genius which must out. Already at the 
Grammar School he could hardly escape a good 
deal of practice through his translation of Latin 
poetry into the vernacular, under the critical eye 
of his master. Some popular forms of verse in this 
lyrical time of life, for instance the ballad and the 
song, he had already often heard and imitated, at 
the same time sipping at the first fount of folk- 
lore. But now he begins to translate not Latin so 
much as his own life's experience, external and in- 
ternal, into his English idiom. 

One thinks that droplets of these early versicles 
may have seeped through into the later layers of 
his poetry. He often introduces snatches of some 



72 SHAKE SPE ABE'S LIFE-DBAMA 

singing ballad into his dramatic situations, poetical 
jetsam which could well have floated down from 
the present time of native song-bubbles. There 
are several sonnets, especially the last two, which 
do not rise above the clever metering adolescent, as 
well as not a few dialogues in his plays which rol- 
lic about somewhat boyish. I believe that Venus 
and Adonis is essentially his poem of adolescence 
and its passion, even if he made additions and 
changes before its publication in 1593. For the 
theme of this poem is sensuous love in all its 
adolescent exhilaration and exuberance. And mu- 
sical became his spirit's attunement, as this is the 
time for the soul's most exquisite response to the 
concordance of sweet sounds. Adolescence is the 
world in which to thrill and to dance in answer to 
nature. All through Shakespeare's dramas warbles 
his love of music — did he as a boy play any instru- 
ment? The town-fiddler existed at Stratford as 
everywhere, with his little band of "twangling 
Jacks " ; we may glimpse them in Romeo and 
Juliet, headed seemingly by Simon Catling (mod- 
ern cat-gut scraper). And the village song-singer 
did not fail, nor the verse-spouter like Lincoln's 
Jack Kelso of vanished New Salem, who is sup- 
posed to have introduced Shakespeare to the life- 
long love of our great American President. Recall 
the death-foreboding Lincoln on his last trip, when 
he was heard to voice his dark presentiment in the 
words of the poet, as they haunted him with their 
ominous prophecy and gave him their unearthly 



TEE ADOLESCENT SEAKESPEABE. 73 

power to express himself in the very presence of 
his own Fate : 

Duncan is in his grave, 
After life's fitful fever he sleeps well, 
Treason has done his worst ; nor steel nor 

poison, 
Malice domestic, foreign levy, nothing 
Can touch him further. 

V. Somewhat after the preceding manner we 
are going to assume that the young Shakespeare 
gave evidence of his talent to his community, 
which recognized him as its bright lad. Every 
little American town selects instinctively its best 
man, and likewise its best boy, often hailing the 
latter as its youthful prodigy, and the coming 
President of the United States. And so in its way 
did little Stratford, which could also give to its 
favorite the very human counterstroke of petty 
jealousy. But the town was large enough to feel 
the spirit of the time, and to respond to all forms 
of the drama which were then fermenting— the 
newer histories, comedies, tragedies, as well as the 
earlier interludes, moralities, mysteries even 
pantomimes and dumb-shows. Such were some of 
the cruder materials which the adolescent Shake- 
speare now appropriated from his home-town and 
its neighborhood, and which he is to transform into 
his future life-work. England's dramatic pro- 
toplasm we may deem it, now everywhere yeasting 
with its coming supreme literary expression. 



74 SRAKESPE ABE'S LIFE-DBAMA 

Shakespeare will show these elemental ingredients 
in all his later productions; several of them may 
be traced even in his greatest Hamlet. 

During this time we have to think that Shake- 
speare won his unique intimacy with immediate 
Nature, which he shows in all his writ, and which 
often tingles him to a creative participation in her 
subtlest processes. Dame Nature he must have ob- 
served and experienced in her secretest haunts, as 
well as in her very act of genesis. Particularly the 
vegetable kingdom he indwelt, since he so often 
metamorphoses the plant into poetry. He seems to 
have possessed an inborn flower-soul, if we may 
judge by the garlands which he weaves and strews 
along his path even in gardenless London. Here 
one thinks of his women whose speech and char- 
acter he can turn to a human inflorescence and 
bloom-fragrance. Perhaps too he caught up all 
these names of flowers strown over his book from 
his mother and his aunts, who must have cultivated 
their household garden. 

If we compare this present adolescent time with 
his former school time, we flnd that each furnishes 
its own distinctive strand to his future work and 
character. The one gives him culture the other 
hands him over to nature; the one is past and 
Classic the other is present and English; more 
theoretical the one, more practical the other; thus 
he passes from study to experience, appropriating 
first what is foreign, and then what is native to the 
soil. This two fold strain we can trace all through 



THE ADOLESCENT SHAKESPEABE. 75 

his dramas, constituting often their two threads, 
the upper and the lower, the cultural and the nat- 
ural, the aristocratic and the popular, the one 
usually cadencing verse and the other talking- 
prose. Still more deeply we may glimpse in this 
dualism that of Southern and Northern Europe, of 
the Mediterranean world and the Germanic, hint- 
ing the centuries' strife between Roma and Teu- 
tonia still active to-day, indeed just now closing its 
latest and bloodiest assize. 

Thus "we dare construe that the youth William 
Shakespeare in two successive eras of his juvenile 
training took up into himself the two chief strains 
of European civilisation. Unconscious of this 
ultimate fact of his education, he nevertheless im- 
bibed it as an embryo which he will hereafter 
mightily evolve and utter, for just that is the bur- 
den of his genius. Moreover he must have felt the 
difference, yea the conflict between these two world- 
views and their peoples, for his work hereafter is 
to bring them together and to reconcile them in his 
way, which is that of art, specially the dramatic. 

VI. But from this far-away look into elsewhere, 
we shall now turn and take a peep down into his 
heart where is already swelling and bursting up 
into utterance that sovereign emotional nature of 
his, which on the whole must be acclaimed his most 
compelling power over his fellow-man. Is not 
Shakespeare the greatest lover that ever lived and 
the most contagious? Indeed he never stops giving 
vent to this adolescent fire of his soul till the cur- 



76 SHAKESPE ABE'S LIFE-DBAMA 

tain falls on his old-age; for instance, we feel its 
glow still in his Tempest, well-taken as the grand 
finale of his Life-drama. Rightly love may be re- 
garded as his most universal theme, to which he 
gives his deepest intensive expression both in its 
godlike and demonlike manifestations, portraying 
its destructive as well as its constructive energy. 

Here we touch the largest, strongest, most last- 
ing experience of the poet Shakespeare — his love's 
defeats and triumphs, his own heart's tragedies 
and comedies, which his genius poured forth into 
the enduring word. He was certainly endowed 
with more than his quota of love's ecstasies and 
tortures. The primal outburst of this mighty 
energy would naturally take place during these 
youthful years. The Titanic adolescent must have 
quaked with the tempestuous ups and downs of his 
elemental passion, which now distinctly opens its 
sluices and never ceases its overflow into his utter- 
ance. No personal record we have of Shakespeare 's 
early love-throes, such as we possess of Goethe and 
of Dante. But Shakespeare seems to have had a 
huger volcano of adolescence aflame with love in 
his young heart than either the German or the 
Italian poet, though they were by no means want- 
ing in this two-edged gift of the Gods. 

Finally the slow years touch the swift moment 
when his love or his passion suddenly flares up 
into a flame of fame or notoriety which seems to in- 
crease with time till now. A little rural affair of 
heart has caused more discussion than any other 



SHAKESPEABE'S MABBIAGE. 77 

biographic fact of Shakespeare. The bound- 
bursting passionate youth has reached the breaking 
point of his years of mentionless obscurity and 
erupts into fierce spoken daylight ; adolescence 
pushes him forth to its extreme in the deed. 

So we come to the role of Anne Hathaway in 
Shakespeare's Life-drama, through which she plays 
under a diversity of masked forms from beginning 
to end, and even beyond the poet's end she holds 
out, living longer than he did. His most cardinal 
experience of Stratford is fatefully connected with 
her name and with her woman-nature ; in fact it 
may be said that without her part, this Life-drama 
of the poet in its present shape is quite inconceiv- 
able. Let us see if we can catch through the inter- 
vening and distorting centuries some right glimpse 
of Shakespeare's wife, and of her contribution to 
his life's discipline and expression. 

V. 

Shakespeare 's Marriage. 

Overhasty, compulsory, secret — who was to 
blame, he, she, or both, or perchance neither? Such 
is the problem or chain of problems, which looms 
up at the present turn of the poet's life before 
every reader of Shakespeare, man and especially 
woman, and which is capable of being looked at 
from many a little nook of defense and of attack, 
or of simple curious neutrality. The daring boy 



78 SHAKESPEABE'S LIFE-DBAMA 

seems to break out of adoleseenee into marriage at 
one jump along with the sun. For it so happens 
that the long night of the previous five years is 
now suddenly dispersed by the daylight of au- 
thentic evidence ; co-temporary documents can be 
cited for every step in this far-reaching, deeply 
determining crisis of his career. 

Fact first is that toward the end of 1582, young 
William Shakespeare, then a little more than 
eighteen years and a half old, was married to Anne 
Hathaway, the daughter of a substantial yeoman 
of Shottery in the neighborhood of Stratford, the 
wife being some eight years older than the hus- 
band, according to the inscription on her tomb- 
stone which in such case would be most likely to 
tell the naked truth. Fact second informs us that 
in less than six months after the marriage rite, a 
child, Susanna, was born to the pair, the baptism 
of the infant being of record in the Stratford 
Church under the date of May 26th 1583. Fact 
third is that a written instrument exists indicating 
that the marriage must have taken place in quite 
a hurry, namely "with once asking the bans of 
matrimony", instead of the customary three times 
with intervals between. Of course there was good 
reason for this unusual precipitation. Fact fourth 
brings us the surprise that the parents of the bride- 
groom, who was a minor and hence still an infant 
in law, are not mentioned in the marriage bond, 
and evidently were not present at the final cere- 
mony. On the other hand the bride's people and 



SHAKE SFE ABE'S MABBIAGE. 79 

friends were in emphatic evidence through all the 
proceedings. Hence it has been inferred that the 
act of marriage was kept secret from the Shake- 
speares and the Ardens. Verily a hurried, one- 
sided, clandestine affair, in which the infant 
William Shakespeare gets a wife and also an in- 
fant of his own, passing out of his previous eclipse 
into the full blaze of a famous deed and eternal on 
account of the eternity of the man. 

Many have been the censures and their rebuttals, 
many the explanations and apologies as well as in- 
vectives and scandal-mongerings swathing about 
this first great adventure of the youthful poet; but 
let them pass. Our part is to accept it as a fact 
coloring all his days afterward, as a pivotal experi- 
ence in his destiny, without which he probably 
never would have turned down the road from 
Stratford to London, and, who can tell? — might 
never have become Shakespeare the dramatist. 

But the deed is done, the whole secret gets out 
and is scattered broadcast by busy tongues ever 
ready to volunteer in such a telling cause. Scandal- 
mongering was then and still is a popular enter- 
tainment, for man and woman. Stratford won a 
name for success in this business, if in none other. 
But the families concerned must have had their 
own cud for silent rumination. Even the dismal 
antiquarian would break a smile, if he could dig up 
what the Shakespeares said on the occasion, con- 
templating this escapade of the finest scion labeled 
with their name. And what would the aristocratic 



80 SHAKESPE ABE'S LIFE-DBAMA 

Ardens whisper through their startled household, 
especially the two spinster aunts? Would their 
barbed tongues spare those plebeian Hathaways? 
But oh! what a heart-break would the mother, 
Mary Arden Shakespeare, sigh forth at this mesal- 
liance of her darling boy, who had already shown 
the most promising mind of the whole connection, 
and for whom she had such a high ambition, espe- 
cially in the way of matching him properly, that 
prime maternal duty! Her one bright hope 
darkens to despair, as she is compelled to swallow 
this bitterest dose of her motherhood. Poor 
woman ! she already had much to suffer from her 
husband's ever-deepening failure in life, with pos- 
sible reproaches from her kin for her own eariy 
mesalliance. And now her boy, pride and prop 
of her advancing days, has married a peasant girl, 
and soon has a six months' baby on hand. Fate 
of the parent of genius it seems; Frau Rath, 
mother of Goethe, had even a harder trial. 

But we emphatically maintain that after the 
first shock had passed, the poet's mother clung to 
her son, and did what was possible for him and his 
under the circumstances. And he never forgot her 
devotion at his most trying ordeal of fate. Many 
years later, a quarter of a century in fact, he cele- 
brated her as ' ' the most noble mother in the world ' ' 
under the guise of the Eoman matron, Volumnia, 
and confessed 

There's no man in the world 
More bound to his mother. 



SHAKESPE ABE'S MAMEIAGE. 81 

All of which we construe as a debt of gratitude 
paid in the worthiest way he could pay it, when 
he had returned a rich and famous man to Strat- 
ford from London. 

After another year and nine months, Anne, 
Shakespeare's spouse, gave birth to twins, a boy 
and a girl who were named Hamnet and Judith 
after Hamnet Sadler and his wife Judith, known 
as Shakespeare's friends. And evidently staunch 
friends they were in the pinch of sorest n.eed, being 
held worthy to receive such marked recognition 
instead of either of the kindred families, which 
might shun the honor. The baptism of the twins, 
probably three days after their birth, is dated, 
Feb. 2nd, 1585. Shakespeare must have lived 
toward three years with his wife before leaving for 
London. It was no easy time for the young pair. 
The boy-husband had no independent means of 
livelihood. His father, sunken in fortune, could 
do nothing for his son, and was probably in ill 
humor at the match besides. Of course, the rich 
blue-blooded Ardens averted their eyes and their 
cash from the scapegrace of their blood. How did 
the couple live? Support must have come largely 
from the side of the wife. Anne had some money 
of her ovni inherited from her father, who had 
died shortly before her marriage. Doubtless she 
possessed other means, but probably not much. 
Shelter for the pair must have been found with her 
relatives in the cottage at Shottery — with the 
Hathaways, not with the Shakespeares or Ardens. 



82 8HAKJE8TE ABB'S LIFE-DBAMA 

But in the flow of the exacting years her funds 
must have commenced to run low, and the young 
husband's few wage pennies would not suffice. 
Probably at this point her tongue broke loose, and 
he had to listen to many a reproach for the insuf- 
ficient support of his family. Well, she had some 
provocation; similar upbraidings from the mouth 
of the ill-supported wife are not unknown to-day. 
Of some such experience Shakespeare has left as 
mementos conjugal pictures in several of his earlier 
plays. The scolding wife Adriana in Comedy of 
Errors has altogether more red blood in her con- 
duct and words than any other character of the 
play, so that we begin to think she must have been 
photographed from the living model. Then the 
Taming of the Shrew is rather tame till Katherine, 
the shrew, begins to make the argument lively with 
her tongue and her caprices, which Petruchio in the 
play has to meet and put down, though Shake- 
speare himself fled from the task. Other lesser in- 
stances might be traced in his more youthful 
dramas, showing that a slashing termagant had 
spun a quivering thread through his Life-drama, 
and left vivid memories, which it is his peculiar 
gift of genius to transmute to acting persons on the 
stage. 

Another reminiscence of his marriage portion he 
bore with him to the end of his days — the picture 
of the jealous woman or several pictures taken of 
her, the same example being used in several atti- 
tudes or on different occasions, when he was lashed 



SHAKESPEAEE'S MABBIAGE. 83 

scornfully by her tongue's scourge. Here again 
we are inclined to see that the wife had a good deal 
of provocation. That young husband, talented and 
gallant, eight years her junior, had been a free 
rover and lover among the country-girls around 
Stratford, and probably did not renounce fully 
the habit after a forced wedlock. Of these female 
rivals Anne Hathaway had been the one who had 
caught him, being at the same time caught herself. 
She must have known well the situation, which by 
the way- is highly conducive to jealousy : husband 
more youthful, higher-born, better educated, with 
that poetic gift of making sweet love-verses on the 
spot. Hence she would naturally call him to a 
reckoning for any little absence out of hours, or 
for any stray look of his toward another woman, 
which she might detect. The female character 
Adriana (already alluded to) in Comedy of Errors 
has her tongue sharpened to the keenest edge by 
her jealousy, with which so many of Shakespeare's 
women are touched more or less stressfully. Nor 
are his men, including himself, devoid of this pas- 
sion; best known is Othello. But Anne Hathaway 
will be amply avenged by the Dark Lady, who tor- 
tures her poet more than Anne ever did or could 
her husband. 

Possibly this wedding experience may help ac- 
count for another fact in Shakespearian por- 
traiture. He had the tendency to make the girl 
chase after her lover: against which many a high- 
spirited female reader has been heard loudly to 



84 SB AKESPE ABE'S LIFE-DEAMA 

protest, and one male reader I know of. In an 
overflowing juvenile play, Love's Labor's Lost, he 
causes a group of four high-bred, daring young- 
women to storm the Castle of Learning, which 
they know is occupied by four young gentle- 
men who have taken the vow of celibacy: "not to 
see a woman. ' ' What a libel on the sex ! Prob- 
ably Shakespeare could cite in defense from his 
own book of life that Anne Hathaway had 
stormed his Castle without his consent by sheer 
violence, and that her love's labors were not lost. 
It looks as if she took the initiative from the first 
eye-glance. But the most courageous, victorious 
man-hunter in our Shakespeare's book of ladies is 
the heroine set forth in All's Well That Ends Well, 
the redoubtable Helena, whose mighty will is able 
to stake her womanly honor that she win to be her 
husband the man whom she loves. Dare we not 
imagine that in portraying such a conqueress the 
poet felt the echo of a far-off experience of his 
own with Anne Hathaway? At any rate she 
trapped her prize, namely a husband, by a similar 
device, even if disguised with some thin variations. 
Still we feel in duty bound to speak a good word 
for Anne Hathaway, even if she, being eight years 
older than her boy-lover, may have to take the 
chief blame for their common slip, especially from 
her own sex. But if she did more than her share 
of the loving and marrying, on the other hand she 
did more than her share in the maintenance of the 
new-born family. That she expressed at times to 



SHAKESPEABE'S MABBIAGE. 85 

her youthful help-meet his lack of help with some 
asperity of temper, is excusable, even if not alto- 
gether admirable. Mark well that she with her 
relatives in the old farm house at Shottery must 
have fed the children of William Shakespeare tov 
years, till he was able to send some remittances 
from London. We believe that the poet himself 
did not fail to appreciate her devoted struggle for 
his three babes, and when he had won his economic 
independence, he returned to her and to them at 
Stratford, providing for his family one of the 
finest houses in town. Of the two she was not the 
greater sinner, and he knew it well, and his justice, 
and still more we believe, his generosity certainly 
would acknowledge the fact. 

To be sure, theirs was not an ideal marriage at 
the start, nor an ideal bond through life. Anne 
Hathaway was her husband's inferior in intellect 
and education, not to speak of social rank, A true 
and fitting union would be of head and heart as 
well as of appetite, and it is probable that her 
greater age lessened even love's sensuous appeal, 
especially with the exacting years of her maternal 
task. We can understand, though we may not 
justify, the poet's demonic but productive infatu- 
ation for a talented, witty, high-bred, much 
younger woman, who as the Dark Lady will here- 
after stir the most exalted strains of his Muse. 
Still I do not believe with some fault-scenting, 
rather misogynistie Shakespearians that the poet 
ever was completely estranged from his wife, the 



86 SHAKESPE ABE'S LIFE-DBAMA 

mother of his three children, and their faithful 
nurse through their long and trying infantile pov- 
erty. His magnanimity would certainly forgive, 
yea justify her early tongue-lashings as not alto- 
gether undeserved. They probably ceased with a 
full coffer. Moreover I can see him return to 
Stratford after eleven years (in 1596) when hus- 
band and wife met in reconciliation over the grave 
of their dead son Hamnet — doubtless the hardest 
blow of fate that ever smote the poet. 

So we conceive Anne Hathaway 's part in Shake- 
speare 's Life-drama. It is evident that he in his 
later years did not deem his escapade the au- 
spicious way of getting married. In Twelfth Night 
he gives a warning spoken from his own experi- 
ence: ''Let still the woman take an elder than 
herself" as a. married mate. Even stronger does 
wise Prospero emphasize his admonition: "If 
thou dost break her virgin knot before" the mar- 
riage rite, the result will be "barren hate, sour- 
eyed disdain and discord ' ', so that ' ' you shall hate 
it both", namely "the union of your bed." Thus 
in his last drama we catch a forbidding echo of his 
early relation to Anne Hathaway. Then again in 
Measure for Measure the movement is to rescue 
from the clutch of the law a man who is guilty of 
Shakespeare's youthful deed. 

Still when all is told, we are not to forget that 
Shakespeare went back to his wife and family at 
Stratford in the plenitude of his fortune and fame, 
and sought to share with them all he had won in 



SHAKESPE ABE'S MABBIAGE. 87 

the way of distinction and wealth. Such an act 
can only be construed as a kind of atonement for 
the past, of which feeling Shakespeare's later 
works are full. There breathes a spirit of re- 
pentance and expiation through his concluding 
dramas, whose deepest note is restorative, recon- 
ciling, mediatorial. I read amendment and rep- 
aration in these later actions of Shakespeare at 
Stratford, which bear their import also for Anne 
Hathaway. Thus his writ mirrors to the last his 
soul's deepest experience. 

The words of Prospero in the Tempest, probably 
the poet's final play, hint his cardinal change of 
spirit, really the transition to his closing Period of 
forgiveness and atonement out of his tragic time 
of fury : 

with my nobler reason 'gainst my fury 
Do I take part. The rarer action is 
In virtue than in vengeance: they being 

penitent 
The sole drift of my purpose doth extend 
Not a frown further. Go release them, 

Ariel — 

which may also be conceived as Shakespeare's own 
release. 

Contrition, confession, inner absolution are of 
course far more directly and personally expressed 
in the sonnets than in the dramas. An example 
may be cited (119) : 



88 SnAKESPEABE'S LIFE-DBAMA 

What potions have I drunk of Siren tears 
Distilled from limbecks foul as Hell 

within — 
benefit of ill! now find I true 
That better is by evil still made better! 
And ruined love when it is built anew, 
Grows fairer than at first, more strong, 

far greater; 
So I return rebuked to my content 
And gain by ill thrice more than I have 

spent. 

This gives a very suggestive glimpse of Shake- 
speare's philosophy of life, such as he reached in 
his later time through the experience of evil, which 
he has been able to transmute into positive good or 
benefit. And that once ''ruined love" being now 
''built anew, grows fairer than at first, more 
strong, far greater." We are to remember that 
these sonnets, first published in 1609, have many 
hints of his return and restoration to Stratford 
both spatial and spiritual, where was enacted the 
scene of his first "ruined love." But the deeper 
turn here is the very process of his new reconcilia- 
tion, telling in the lines the real unmasked message 
of the poet's own self, of his stripped ego, which 
has to be more or less disguised in his dramatic 
personages. 

Here it is worth while to add another sonnet com- 
posed in the same penitential mood which shows 
the man at his own soul's confessional (146) : 



SHAKESPE ABE'S MABBIAGE. 89 

Poor soul, the center of my sinful earth, 
Thralled by these rebel powers that thee 

array, 
Why dost thou pine within and suffer 

dearth ? — 
Within be fed, without be rich no more. 
So shalt thou feed on Death that feeds on men, 
And Death once dead, there's no more 

dying then. 

For me this is one of the subtlest, deepest insights 
of Shakespeare, which we shall not fail to stress 
again, intimating, as it does, what is the supreme 
function of the individual in this existence of ours : 
he is to conquer Death, and thus win his immor- 
tality. Evidently Shakespeare saw or felt in his 
loftier contemplative mood, perchance during his 
Stratford retreat, which gave him time and repose, 
that he had achieved this ultimate aim of all Life : 
namely the undoing of Death, Life's last enemy. 
Still deeper we may peer into the depths of the 
foregoing utterance, which gleams to us destruc- 
tion as finally self -destroying or negation as self- 
negative: "Death once dead", being served up to 
itself by man, "there's no more dying then". 
Lastly we may here catch Shakespeare wielding the 
sudden lightning flash of mind known to some of 
the world's greatest thinkers as the Dialectic (not 
our so-called dialectics by any means) and we 
query: where did he get that? Enough of this 
for the present, but more anon perchance. 



90 SHAKESPE ABE'S LIFE-DBAMA 

In such fashion, we put together the first stage 
and the last of Shakespeare's marriage, both oc- 
curring at Stratford and constituting two mem- 
orable turns of his life's total discipline. But 
there was an intermediate time, that of his separa- 
ration from family and town, and therewith his 
flight to a very different environment, that of a 
great city with its vaster outlook and opportunity. 

VI. 

Departure from Stratford. 

It is not known on what day of what month of 
the year 1585, this date also being questioned, the 
clock struck the time for Shakespeare to quit his 
birthplace and to start on a new career in a new 
world. The youthful limit-breaker had probably 
felt the longing, and even cherished the secret re- 
solve to take such a step out of his narrow environ- 
ment, which was ever becoming more unbearable 
to his aspiring spirit. Already young men of 
Stratford had broken loose into the greater field of 
the city; why not he? At any rate somewhere 
toward the end of the mentioned year (1585), he 
cast his farewell look at his twin babes, Hamnet 
and Judith, then not far from weaning time; 
surely he would give them a kiss, though ''muling 
and puking" in papa's arms. But soon he turned 
down the road toward London, alreadj'' the goal of 
his poetic dreams. We venture to say that his 



DEPABTVBE FROM STBATFOBD. 91 

tender heart throbbed more than one tear, as he 
looked back and saw the spire of the Stratford 
Church slowly sink out of vision, possibly with the 
dim but daring presentiment that he would one 
day be buried under it as a world-hero, to whose 
tomb pilgrimages would be made from the ends 
of the earth, while time lasted, perchance. 

There is little doubt that his situation at home 
was galling. The rustic but laborious Hathaways 
would see in him a hungry leech on their estate. 
The snappy wife would cut his pride by letting 
him feel his dependence on her people, snarling 
many a plebeian sneer at his pretentious aristo- 
cratic kin, the Aldens. Doubtless he would hear at 
Shottery contempt for his father, poor John 
Shakespeare, and ever growing poorer till he sank 
all his wife's property, along with his own, into 
hopeless indebtedness. Not a pleasant home was 
that for all-attuning William Shakespeare with his 
unappreciative helpmeet and three drooling and 
prattling babes. It may be that he was even in- 
vited to leave, kicked out as it were by those hard- 
fisted leathery-palmed sons of toil, the agricultural 
Hathaways, who had more than Hotspur's con- 
tempt for anything like poetry, which must have 
already become young Shakespeare's all-engross- 
ing passion and mental occupation. How could 
he help yielding to the Titanic drive of his genius 
now bursting into its early flower? 

It is, therefore, very probable that the young 
poet, whose nature kept bubbling over with verses 



92 SHAKESPE ABE'S LIFE-DBAMA 

on all occasions during these years (from eighteen 
to twenty-one), the very heyday of sudden spon- 
taneous poetic eruptions, was not a good laborer at 
the plough or in the harvest-field. With the strict 
farmer's criterion of steady work the rollicking 
rhymester does not harmonize, and he would find 
little sympathy in that prosaic household with its 
treadmill tasks. What a nuisance he made of him- 
self spouting his jingles and love-ditties at those 
rustic Philistines instead of putting his hand on 
his hoe and keeping it there, as they did! Still 
Ave may imagine our ever-poetizing Willie seated 
at the kitchen fire-side, and in reply to some scorn- 
ful fling of the boors coruscating bright metaphors, 
^' while greasy Joan doth keel the pot." 

Doubtless the boy-poet, sprinkling his inoppor- 
tune and often stinging satirical versicles upon 
everything and everybody about him, must have 
met with vengeful rebuffs. His gift could not help 
calling forth many a frown from its victims, and 
many a sharp word of jealous disparagement. Can 
we catch some scene out of his later books in which 
he pictures this experience of his under a mask of 
course, but pulsing its words directly from his own 
life? The following lines seem to us a reporter's 
jotting of something heard on the spot, possibly 
around the rustic hearth at Shottery: 

I had rather be a kitten and cry mew 
Than one of these same metre ballad-mongers, 
I had rather hear a brazen canstick turned, 
Or a dry wheel grate on an axle-tree. 



DEPABTUBE FBOM STBATFOBD. 93 

Very rural are these telling comparisons, natural 
product of the farm-house, which still farther ex- 
presses its disgust in its own range of images: 

And that would set my teeth nothing on edge, 
Nothing so much as mincing poetry, 
'Tis like the forced gait of a shuffling nag. 

Thus young Shakespeare's poetic art appeared to 
his peasant environment as unnatural, forced, 
trivial. To be sure, it is Hotspur who is here 
speaking, but the part hardly suits him, the aristo- 
crat, and we feel it to be Shakespeare 's own sketch 
of himself as conceived by the rustic clod-hopper, 
and flung spitefully into his own face. 

Nor should we fail to notice in this connection 
that haughty Hotspur also voices Shakespeare's 
contempt for Welsh folklore and perchance super- 
stition, with which Glendower keeps seething over 
on all occasions, telling of those miraculous appear- 
ances, ''the earth did shake when I was born", 
and "the heavens were all on fire", which super- 
natural signs "have marked me as extraordinary", 
so that "I am not in the roll of common men. " 
Furthermore Hotspur complains that Glendower 
"held me last night at least nine hours in reckon- 
ing up the several devils' names that were his 
lackeys." This tingles evidently a Shakespearian 
echo of some personal experience. Thus into the 
mouth of Hotspur Shakespeare puts his own con- 
siderable acquainance with that effervescent Welsh 
imagination as he heard it at work in his youth 



94 SHAKESPEABE'S LIFE-DBAMA 

along the border in and around Stratford. More- 
over the "Welshman and the Englishman are here 
placed in sharp contrast as regards their distinctive 
spiritual attributes. Hotspur, also addicted to 
flurries of fantasy, is never their victim but stays 
anchored in his clear understanding, while Glen- 
dower is shown the thrall of his fertile imagination, 
even if he employs with cunning purpose mystifica- 
tion as a means of power. 

The drama from which these extracts are taken 
(Henry IV, First Part) is full of the poet's 
youthful reminiscences of Stratford, and reminds 
of the town 's frontier character. Doubtless he had 
seen instances of what happened to Mortimer: 
''my wife can speak no English, I no Welsh." 
Also Welsh songs are sung and Welsh dialogue is 
spoken. in this drama, both of which the boy may 
well have heard not only in the streets but also on 
the little town-stage at Stratford, for the place was 
bi-lingual, having many Welsh and half -Welsh in- 
habitants. How much of the Welsh tongue the 
spry-witted boy Shakespeare may have picked up 
from his surroundings, cannot now be guessed ; but 
of his funny studies in the Welsh-English brogue 
we have considerable samples in the word-twists of 
Parson Evans and Captain Fluellin. 

The open-minded reader cannot help feeling the 
personal element in all these scenes; they are 
drawn from the immediate experiences of the dra- 
matist himself, who here transmutes them into his 
most vivid spontaneous poetry. One other passage 



DEPABTUBE FBOM STBATFOBD. 95 

of like pith we should take from Shakespeare's 
note-book, whose content was inscribed at least 
upon his brain at Shottery: 

Oh he's as tedious 

As a tired horse, a railing wife 
Worse than a smoky house — 

All these seem to be the poet 's experiences of Anne 
Hathaway 's cottage, which is still shown to the 
pious pilgrim, but now somewhat fixed up with a 
stove for visitors. Then this fragrant wafture 
from the old kitchen he has sent reeking down 
time: 

I had rather live 
With cheese and garlic in a wind-mill, far — 

on which well-scented foods he was regaled to a 
surfeit at that simple farmer's table. Shake- 
speare's nose seems to have been the most re- 
sponsive and critical part of his total organism. 
He was a grand connoisseur of all sorts of smells; 
especially the breath of the working common people, 
laden with the odor of garlic and onions, was as un- 
endurable to him as to the son of Roman Volumnia. 
Still we may wonder how he could tolerate the 
stench of that garbage heap, which lay under his 
window at his elegant mansion known as New 
Place, on account of whose unsanitary condition the 
poet's most searching and re-searching biographer 
(Halli well-Phillips), thinks he took disease and 
died. 



96 SHAKESPE ABE'S LIFE-DBAMA 

But there was one person in this unfriendly en- 
vironment of Stratford who sympathized with 
Shakespeare and all his troubles, and supported 
him in all his aspirations — that was Volumnia the 
mother of our Stratford Coriolanus, who, ''poor 
hen, has clucked thee safely home" from the wars 
external and also internal, for he had his inner 
battle as well as his outer conflict with his crushing- 
circumstances. So he fails not to erect her lasting 
monument in a play which he must long have medi- 
tated while reading his Plutarch, but which he 
probably finished shortly after her death in 1608. 
And doubtless he could read a good deal of himself 
into the defiant Coriolanus, for he was a creative, 
yea self-creative reader of books. Also he could 
not help often recalling his mood when he first 
took flight from uncongenial Stratford. 

It is, accordingly, our conception that Shake- 
speare had been ready to take his departure for 
some time when a particular event put speed into 
his lingering footsteps. This was the famous epi- 
sode of his deer-stealing, which is said to have oc- 
curred in the park of Sir Thomas Lucy near Strat- 
ford. The first biographer of Shakespeare, Nicho- 
las Rowe, writing in 1709, that is, a century and 
a quarter after the event, is our prime voucher for 
the fact, declaring that the young law-breaker 
"was prosecuted by that gentleman, somewhat too 
severely as he thought," so that the poetic culprit 
"made a ballad upon him . . . which is said 
to have been so very bitter that it redoubled the 



DEPABTVBE FROM STBATFOED. 97 

prosecution against him," and caused his sudden 
flight to London. Moreover Rowe affirms that the 
said ballad, though it be lost, was ''probably the 
first essay of his poetry," Impossible! Shake- 
speare was then twenty-one years old, and the 
young genius full of creative energy had babbled 
his rhymes, and thrown off his ballads and versicles 
from his early boyhood. Indeed it is our opinion 
that he carried to London in his head, and possibly 
in his pocket or knapsack, a number of poetic es- 
says and- fragments which he will use in his later 
works. 

In fact this very experience with Sir Thomas 
Lucy he directly employs in two of his more mature 
plays. The first scene of The Merry Wives of 
Windsor is a burlesque on the poet 's trial, in which 
Justice Shallow stands for Sir Thomas Lucy, and 
for the offender, who is Shakespeare, is substituted 
Sir John Falstaff, against whom Shallow makes the 
charge: ''You have beaten my men, killed my 
deer, and broke open my lodge." Indeed Windsor 
is disguised Stratford, and here is located "in the 
county of Gloster. " Also in the Second Part of 
Henry lY Shakespeare has introduced the same 
Justice Shallow as the object of Falstaff 's con- 
tempt. Thus the poet did not forget to satirize 
Sir Thomas Lucy a dozen years after the case of 
deer-stealing in allusions which may still be an 
echo of the real occurrences and even of the old 
ballad. 

Still all such grounds of accounting for Shake- 



98 SHAKESPE ABE'S LIFE-DBAMA 

speare's flight to London from Stratford are rela- 
tively external; the deepest necessity for this step 
lay in the push of his genius. He knew that he 
must change his environment sooner or later. The 
domestic situation might prod his resolution, and 
the legal embroilment might fix the very day or 
minute; still the ultimate motive came not from 
without but from within. He must have had some 
dim forefeeling of what he had to do in this world, 
and have been waiting for the right conjuncture. A 
mature man of twenty-one he knew what he 
wanted and where lay his future; he had re- 
peatedly seen the theater and tried poetry ; he was 
already stage-struck and verse-struck, and per- 
chance somewhat city-struck. With the deepest 
all-impelling equipment of destiny forth ,he 
marches toward his goal. 

And now can we bring before ourselves the mood 
of the young traveler, probably pedestrian, as he 
turns down the road toward London, and, defeated 
seemingly in life, takes his last look across the 
Avon bridge at his receding home-town? Swaying 
between melancholy and hope, as his characters so 
often do, we may cite a little picture of him drawn 
in one of his Sonnets (No. 29), which, whenever 
written, can be taken as a kind of confession sug- 
gestive at least of his present mental state in its 
oscillation between the gloom and the exaltation of 
genius : 

When, in disgrace with fortune and men's eyes, 
I all alone beweep my outcast state, 



TEE AGE. 99 

And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries, 
And look upon myself and curse my fate, 
Wishing me like to one more rich in hope, 
Featured like him, like him with friends 

possessed. 
Desiring this man 's art and that man 's scope, 
With what I most enjoy contented least; — 
Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising 
Haply I think on thee, — and then my state 
Like to the lark at break of day arising. 
From sullen earth sings hymns at 

heaven's gate — 

Be it the Muse, or some man or some woman, who 
here slides into his soul with "Haply I think of 
thee ' ', the result is the same ; up and down the 
gamut of pain and pleasure he fleets, internally 
and externally teetering along the road to London 
town. 

VII. 

The Age. 

Having cast a glimpse inwardly at the young 
man taking a resolute new plunge into the future's 
ocean, we may next scan outwardly the trend of 
the age into which he is now driving, and of which 
he is to make himself the greatest and most last- 
ing spokesman. This year 1585 had seen Elizabeth 
enthroned in England for a quarter of a century 
and more; the Reformation had been fairly sta- 
bilized both in the law of the land and in the hearts 



100 SHAKESPEABE'S .LIFE-DBAMA 

of the people; the religious separation from Rome 
had become complete and final. Then the political 
antagonism between the Latin world and the Anglo- 
Saxon was rapidly coming to a head and was 
nearly ready to break out into open war. Latin 
Spain, when Shakespeare was sauntering along 
the highway toward London, had about finished 
her huge fleet blazoned by her as the Armada In- 
vincible, whose far-heralded object was the de- 
thronement of Queen Elizabeth and the subjuga- 
tion of that Northern upstart England to the 
Mediterranean Church and State. Thus the grand 
world-historical collision between the old and the 
new civilisation, or between Teutonia and Roma 
(or rather Romania) in its most recent form, was 
soon to be fought out afresh first on the sea, and 
then perchance on the land. 

All Britain seethed in a ferment of which the 
center was the capital city, whitherwards our 
young poet had now turned his look and his 
thought. As he approached the heart of the mael- 
strom, he could not help feeling the time's mighty 
pulsation, and giving to it some utterance after 
his way, nuances of which we may still trace in his 
earlier dramas on English History with their dis- 
tinctive national attunement. 

And here let us set down an opposite fact by way 
of contrast, a light-point of reconciliation amid this 
dark time of venomous confiict between Northern 
and Southern Europe. Our youthful poet bore in 
his' soul on his journey to London the love of the 



TEE AGE. 101 

Classical Renascence, especially that which had 
been taking place in Italy during his century and 
the previous one; that revival of ancient learning 
it was which had spread over Europe and had 
penetrated even to little Stratford, in whose school 
the lad Shakespeare had drunk deeply and last- 
ingly of antique Latin culture, as we have already 
seen. This Classical discipline, which unites his 
spirit so intimatel}^ with the South, he will never 
forget, but will cherish it and use it to the end of 
his career. We shall often have occasion to note 
with what affection and skill he conjoins and con- 
ciliates those two fighting cultures, the Germanic 
and the Latin, in his works, especially in his come- 
dies. From this point of view we are to conceive 
Shakespeare, within his special field, which is the 
literary, as the great reconciler of the centuries- 
long European feud between Germania and Ro- 
mania, who have just yesterday (1918) concluded 
their latest but bloodiest and most destructive 
warfare stretching nearly around the globe. Hence 
if the new healing word of our time be reconcilia- 
tion of these two furious antagonists for all future 
ages, the sovereign English poet has already ut- 
tered it in his art, and to us imparts it through 
the training of his writ. 

But coming back to Shakespeare's own date, we 
find that he is now thrust, headforemost as it were, 
into the two grand strifes of his people and of the 
Elizabethan era, the political and the religious, 
which scission cleaves Europe into two hostile 



102 SHAKESPE ABE'S LIFE-DBAMA 

halves both in Church and in State. Of this scis- 
sion he will show a few discordant traces. On the 
other hand out of the supreme European dualism 
he builds in his spirit's domain his all-subduing 
harmony, poetical and cultural, whose concords 
just now perchance thrill sweeter than ever to the 
peace-hoping soul of the time. 

In Shakespeare's age England had already be- 
come too small for England. She had begun to 
feel herself prisoned in the tight walls of her tight 
little island home, and she was furiously wrestling 
within herself to burst through her sea-limits into 
a free new world. The Wars of the Roses had 
been fought to a close, and had largely purified 
her of her internal discords so that she could turn 
her united strength outward, beginning that globe- 
mastery which has kept widening out farther and 
farther down to the present moment, the recent 
war (1918) having shaken into her capacious lap 
vaster possessions than ever before, and also con- 
firmed her naval supremacy. 

This bound-bursting spirit of the Elizabethan 
era, which our poet profoundly felt and appro- 
priated, and which gave to him the sovereign bent 
of his genius, may here be noted in two of its chief 
manifestations. The first is England's leap from 
her confining shores into the wide Ocean which 
had hitherto walled her in comparatively, so that 
she turned her most defiant limit into the helpful 
stepping-stone to her new marine world-character 
and its supremacy. She became mankind's chief 



THE AGE. 103 

seaman, and enacted the grand symbolic deed of 
her young career in the circumnavigation of the 
globe through her sovereign sailor Sir Francis 
Drake, whom Shakespeare might well have seen 
and even could have known. For Drake's globe- 
rounding ship (The Golden Hind) after its re- 
turn lay anchored in the Thames for several years 
as a kind of prophetic oracle, and was visited by 
vast crowds, and even by Queen Elizabeth in per- 
son, who with royal ceremony on its deck presented 
to its earth-girdling Captain his titled dignity of 
knighthood. There is little doubt that the poet's 
famed and far-visioned utterance (in Midsummer 
Night's Dream) took its first ideal suggestion from 
Drake's real circumterrestrial deed, at whose up- 
lifting view the rapt Shakespearian spirit, masked 
as little winged Puck, not so much tells as fore- 
tells: "I'll put a girdle round the earth in forty 
minutes." Drake's space- voyage was fulfilled in 
some three years, but Shakespeare's (or Puck's) 
time-voyage seems just now to be fulfilling itself, 
after the lapse of three centuries and more, in tele- 
graph and telephone. We may well hold, with 
Elze for instance, that Shakespeare trod the deck 
of this wonder-ship of Drake, and felt the real 
fact propelling his imagination to its farthest 
reaches. For we have already marked how the 
poet takes the solidest reality as the substructure 
to his loftiest poetic temple, and how he needs the 
actual experience of the fact, out of which he is to 
rise to his ideal creation. From this point of view 



104 SHAKESPE ABE'S LIFE-DBAMA 

the Tempest may be conceived as an idealized 
drama of English navigation, and the poet finally 
reveals himself as the prophet of his people. In- 
deed nothing can be more natural than that young 
Shakespeare was himself a sailor for a while during 
the crest of the excitement over the approaching 
Armada. Of course he would enlist on the spot 
to meet the moment, and then drop back into civil 
life when the crisis was over. Or if he did not 
enlist he was like to be seized by the King's press. 
Another manifestation of England's bound- 
bursting spirit during Shakespeare's younger days 
was her attempt to colonize the new world overseas. 
The year before he set out for London, Sir Walter 
Raleigh had sent an expedition which discovered 
and named Virginia, though the first successful 
settlement was made more than two decades later 
(in 1607) at Jamestown. Thus England's per- 
sistent struggle to colonize herself, that is, to re- 
create herself in new communities and new states 
on a new continent, pulsed through the some 
twenty most active and creative years of Shake- 
speare's life. Wherein we may glimpse a deep cor- 
respondence between the poet 's own spirit and that 
of his country, both being so mightily reproductive 
of themselves in their best. For England's politi- 
cal institutions, truly her greatest and worthiest 
achievement, were being reproduced in young fresh 
forms, and transmitted to the rising futurity. It 
was indeed her New Birth, her institutional Re- 
nascence, of which her greatest poet drank at its 



TEE AGE. 105 

first upgush out of the folk-soul, and which he 
transmuted into its noblest wording, into its truly 
universal utterance, so that we are reading him 
now with an ever-renewing delight and instruction, 
from the Atlantic across the Continent to the 
Pacific. 

Nor should we ever let lapse from our mind, 
while dwelling upon this institutional Renascence 
whose progeny is largely the free states and peoples 
of North America, the cotemporaneous cultural 
Renascence, the fresh genesis of the old Mediter- 
ranean civilization and its expression in art and 
literature, which came to Shakespeare and to Eng- 
land chiefly through Italy. In fact these two 
grand Renascences of Shakespeare's time are ulti- 
mately one, being one mighty upburst of the 
Genius of the Age, or if you like better, one colos- 
sal downpour of the World-Spirit through two 
channels welling over into the garden of human 
culture, which it causes to bloom afresh in another 
new world-inflorescence. 

Still there was an element of perennial conflict 
in both these manifestations of the Elizabethan 
era, for both its navigating and colonizing onsets 
over the seas collided with the claims of Spain. 
When the English navigators sailed out into the 
free Ocean, they were already encroaching upon 
what the Spaniard had seized and pre-empted as 
his own, just his watery Main. And the first 
English settlers at Jamestown, or even at Ply- 
mouth, were regarded as trespassers by Spain and 



106 SHAKESPE ABE'S LIFE-DBAMA 

also by Rome, whose papal authority had con- 
ferred the right of possessing the New World upon 
Latin peoples. From this point of view the history 
of Anglo-Saxon America is the record of a con- 
tinual transgression and defiance of the Latin- 
Spanish right of tenure. Thus that old Eliza- 
bethan Armada battle was a germinal conflict re- 
producing itself through the centuries till just now, 
and it seems not yet over. For is not the forward- 
pushing limit-surmounting Anglo-Saxon (so we 
may label him) to-day facing the Spanish heir 
along the Rio Grande boundary, with frequent 
clashes and mutual reprisals? It looks as if the 
Armada duel, after more than three hundred years 
of fighting, has not yet fought itself out to a finish. 
Our interest here is to note that Shakespeare, now 
the far-echoing voice of Angio-Saxondom, was 
present at and shared in the very birth-throes of 
this long political and cultural struggle, and shows 
in his writ many traces of such an epochal experi- 
ence of his country and of himself, especially in his 
English Histories. 

And still another phase of this many-sided 
genetic age we must remark here : the inner moral 
upheaval and renovation of the English soul 
through Puritanism, This movement was already 
in its first early tidal sweep when Shakespeare 
reached out for London, He, as the universal child 
of his time, could not help sharing deeply in the 
grand national revival of conscience, which was 
the chief Puritanic mission, also a great Renascence. 



THE AGE. 107 

His supposed hostile attitude toward Puritanism 
must be revised and corrected in the light of his 
own statements, being largely a mistaken inference 
of modern critics. We shall find him in his earliest 
plays already turning over the problem of con- 
science, which becomes the all-dominating question 
in Hamlet, whose fate lurks in the clash of its col- 
liding sides. 

Still another mighty upburst of the Elizabethan 
era must be here glanced at : its gigantic push for 
self-expression. This tendency took a number of 
forms, which need not here be recounted, except 
the one which culminates in Shakespeare, namely 
the drama. The soul of the Age turned dramatic 
in utterance ; the World-Spirit then spoke English, 
and took to making plays for his own highest self- 
revelation. Never before but once in the course of 
European History has the drama risen to be the 
supreme vehicle of the time's loftiest message; 
that was long ago in antique Athens after her 
heroic deeds in the Persian War. Often the query 
about the Elizabethan era haunts us: why was it 
that just then, for once and for all, during not 
more than forty or fifty years, the English mind, 
the national consciousness itself spoke dramatically 
in its supreme inspiration, and has never been able 
to do so again, in spite of desperate attempts at 
revivals. The Genius of History seems for a few 
years to turn dramatist through Shakespeare, 
whose far inferior fellow-playwrights often catch 
unique whiffs of the same supernal effluence. 



108 SEAK^SFI! ABE'S LIFE-DBAMA 

Whatever be the answer, we find our best reward 
in talking up and communing with these highest 
moments of the age's best spirits, who can bring 
us to share in a mightily creative epoch. It was a 
world-bearing crisis, springing up at the confluence 
of the two great streams of Europe's two civiliza- 
tions; one was the moral and religious Renascence 
rising out of Germany and the North, the other 
was the cultural and literary Renascence rising out 
of Italy and the South. Then both came together 
and married and created their greatest offspring in 
Elizabethan England, which furnished the third 
element, the English institutional life and spirit. 

Into the throbbing center of such a creative 
period young Shakespeare plunged when he quit 
his Stratford home for the nation's capital. Very 
temperamentally he was at first dazed by the 
mighty phenomenon, and had to take his voyage of 
self -discovery. 

VIIL 

Drifting. 

Here we come upon another intervening tract 
of years in Shakespeare's life which is a blank as 
far as documents are concerned. The interval be- 
tween his setting out from home in 1585, and his 
getting anchored in his theatrical vocation about 
1588 — that stretch of inquisitive young-manhood 
from twenty-one to twenty-four — must have been 
very full and buoyant in acquiring a multifarious 



DRIFTING. 109 

personal experience of the city, of the nation, and 
indeed of the world, for London had already be- 
come the great world-city of Northern Europe, 
with a large foreign population. Some of these 
strangers Shakespeare has drawn from life, like the 
French Doctor Caius, and the Spanish Don 
Armado, both of them grotesques speaking English. 
Of course his dramas luxuriate in Italian charac- 
ters, of whom many are simply Englishmen with 
Italian names. For Italy was then the veritable 
Holy Land of the age's culture, to which all 
Europe made pilgrimages, not excepting Shake- 
speare himself, ideally, and also really we think. 

Hence we insert at this point what may be 
called the poet's drifting Triennium, a time of un- 
anchored, miscellaneous, far-ranging but very eager 
and busy acquisition, in which he saw not only the 
day-side of the great metropolis, but likewise its 
night-life, whereof nearly every play of his fur- 
nishes some first-hand glimpses, if we peep under 
its mask just a little. Shakespeare's business now 
is to test all the upbubbling opportunities along 
his path ; he peers down into every vista of the 
future as it shifts under his eye; in such a pene- 
trating search we conceive him trying to find him- 
self and to hear his true call in life. 

It it not known exactly when Shakespeare reached 
London, nor by what means — afoot, on horseback, 
or by wheeled vehicle. Nor is it settled how long 
he loitered on the way or what deflections he may 
have made from the main path. Report runs that 



110 SHAKESPEAEE'S LIFE-DEAMA 

he was a soldier for a while, and it seems likely 
that he had some military experience during these 
stirring times when all England was drilling to 
meet the Spanish Armada. Moreover in the His- 
torical Plays especially he shows acquaintance with 
"the right form of war", which could be drawn 
only from experience. His knowledge of naviga- 
tion has been recognized by expert seamen. In- 
deed he, being a young fellow just of the right age, 
could hardly escape service of some sort, as a sol- 
dier or sailor or indeed both. Another report 
makes him a country schoolmaster who scattered 
his light in dark places along his leisurely journey 
to the capital. Thus he may have enacted his own 
pedagogue Pinch, possibly named from the pinch 
of necessity, still to-day not unknown to that class 
of wage-earners. 

At last, however, he gets to London, or posssibly 
he pushes to that center at once, and thence scat- 
ters himself. Trudging along the Uxbridge road 
we conceive him in some excitement at the view, 
and also in some anxiety about the future, as he 
enters the archway of Newgate into the capital 
city then containing rather more than 100,000 in- 
habitants, according to trustworthy reckoners. 
Again report has busied itself with the question; 
to what occupation did he first set hand? Some 
say he was clerk for a while to an attorney, in 
which employment was learned his knowledge of 
the law. Not a necessary supposition, for Shake- 
speare all his life from youth up lived in the midst 



DBIFTING. Ill 

of litigation, his father's, his own, and his town's 
— Stratford, indeed, bore the name of being a liti- 
gous community. For that matter, the Anglo- 
Saxon people everywhere are on the whole lawsuit- 
loving and also legal-minded — which they have to 
be in order to work their free institutions. Shake- 
speare undoubtedly reflects this general charac- 
teristic of his folk, but hardly more ; indeed we are 
warned by lynx-eyed lawyers that there is a good 
measure of bad law in Shakespeare, who certainly 
did not expect in his hearers the legal precision of 
the Lord Chancellor. 

It may well be supposed that the Stratford new- 
comer first hunted up some of his fellow-townsmen 
who were located in London. One of these was 
Richard Field, a successful printer, whose father 
was a neighbor of the Shakespeare family at Strat- 
ford. Friendly relations were now established be- 
tween the sons, as is shown by the fact that Field 
afterwards printed Shakespeare's two poems, Venus 
and Adonis (in 1593), and Lucrece (in 1594). It 
is likely that Shakespeare, being taskless, may have 
done some odd jobs about the printing office, and 
observed and possibly practised some of the pro- 
cesses of typography, of which he shows traces of 
knowledge in his plays. But it never could have 
been with him a serious occupation; the urge of 
his genius would not let him stay long from his 
true life-calling. Accordingly we have to imagine 
him as seizing the first least chance he had of get- 
ting his grip on the stage, which is now becoming 



112 SRAEESPE ABE'S LIFE-DBAMA 

England 's highest self-expression, and also his own. 
With good reason, therefore, tradition sends him 
to the theater, yea down to the very bottom of the 
theatrical ladder, as if to make the more vivid his 
rise to the topmost sovereignty of his vocation. 
From Sir William D'Avenant, Shakespeare's god- 
son, also rumored to be of still nearer sonship, is 
derived the report that the dramatist's first work 
at the play-house was ''the taking care of the 
gentlemen's horses who came to the play", and 
that he organized a guild of horse-holders known as 
' ' Shakespeare 's boys ' '. But he could not stay out- 
side long with his ability and his affability ; soon he 
gets inside as "prompter's attendant" according 
to Malone. His next step was to become an actor 
on the stage, doubtless at first after a small way. 
Already in Stratford he could well have taken his 
little turn at private theatricals, perhaps then less 
uncommon than to-day. But now at London he 
had the chance not only to see the greatest his- 
trionic genius of the age but also to unfold with 
him into his art — Richard Burbage, who was just 
rising to fame. The influence of Burbage was 
highly formative upon Shakespeare, who had to 
turn into grandeur of speech Burbage 's grand pos- 
sibilities of personation. The poet and the actor 
would naturally co-operate, to the advantage of 
both. Very famous was Burbage 's representation 
of Richard the Third, but he probably reached his 
supreme histrionic fulfilment in the poet's tragic 
heroes — Hamlet, Lear, Othello. When Burbage 



DRIFTING. 113 

studied his great roles, we imagine Shakespeare 
often to have been present, pen in hand, jotting 
down new suggestive strokes to his text. Indeed 
one may well think that Burbage's fully developed 
genius is deeply stamped on Shakespeare's Second 
or Tragic Period. 

But these years of drifting, aimless and anchor- 
less, yet laden with their secret discipline and sore, 
must come to an end. Many a little gleam of this 
time and its peculiar psychology we may catch in 
the later works of the poet. In his first play 
(Com.edy of Errors) we can often sense a passing 
flash of the bewildering scenes of a strange city. 
Antipholus of Syracuse straying around foreign 
Ephesus thus pictures his feeling of lostness: 

I will go lose myself 
And wander up and down to view the city . . 
I to the world am like a drop of water 
That in the ocean seeks another drop, 
Who, falling there to find his fellow forth. 
Unseen, inquisitive, confounds himself 

quite to the point of losing his self -identity. And 
later the same character will cry out : ' ' And here 
we wander in illusions ' ' — which is just the present 
training of the poet. 

Similarly we may overhear Shakespeare telling 
on himself in a much later and maturer drama 
(Antony and Cleopatra) when the Roman hero 
speaks out with a thrill in his words: 



114 SHAKHSPE ABE'S LIFE-DBAMA. 

And all alone 
To-night we'll wander through the streets 

and note 
The qualities of people. 

Can we in this passage avoid imaging William 
Shakespeare, the arch man-builder in his ardent 
search for human material on the streets of Lon- 
don, in the very act of appropriating unto his 
future use "the qualities of people"? 

Of course the great national or rather world- 
historical event of the Elizabethan era was the 
menace and the defeat of the Spanish Armada, 
over which the tense public excitement surged 
through this whole drifting Triennium of Shake- 
speare, and made him drift all the more. Such 
a prolonged, massive, overwhelming experience 
swaying him and all England from above as it 
were, caused him to mark well the pulse-beat of 
the World's History, and brought him into com- 
munion with the Spirit of the Age, which gave 
smiting evidence of its presence in the Armada vic- 
tory. Many a throb of this epoch-begetting na- 
tional deed we can feel recurring underneath his 
whole dramatic career. An early note of the tri- 
umphant outcome we may hear in the play of 
King John (III. 4.): 

So by a roaring tempest on the flood 

A whole armado of connected sail 

Is scattered and disjoined from fellowship. 

And in a passage written many years later we may 



DRIFTING. 115 

spy a reminiscence of England's desperate wrestle 
at the point of fate : 

Your ships are not well manned; 
Your mariners are muleters, reapers, people 
Ingrossed by swift impress — 

so warns Enobarbus, more like an Englishman 
than a Roman. Possibly Shakespeare himself had 
been nipped by the press-gang, to judge by his re- 
peated unfriendly allusions. Even Falstaff, not 
very tender of conscience, can reproach himself: 
"I have misused the King's press damnably." 
And the following outburst (Third Henry VI. 
Act 2, sc. 5) may be taken as an early reminder of 
himself on the part of the poet : 

Oh heavy times begetting such events! 
From London by the King I was pressed 
forth — 

perchance just I, this William Shakespeare, a 
young fellow from the country strolling the streets 
of the capital, was drafted for the lowering crisis. 
Anyhow he saw the thing done, doubtless more 
than once. 

IX. 

Anchored, 

Again we have to construe out of the hand-writ- 
ing of the time an important occurrence or rather 
node in the Life-drama of the poet, which we can- 



116 SHAKESPE ABE'S LIFE-DBAMA. 

not find recorded in any other sort of script. This 
is the cessation of his epoch of drifting, when he 
stabilizes himself and settles down into his perma- 
nent vocation. During the year 1588, as nearly 
as we can make the date out, this pivotal transition 
was in the main accomplished, even if it had a 
before and an after. Behold him, then, wheeling 
into the highway of his great future, which seems 
to have the magic power of always growing greater 
with the lapse of the centuries. 

What could have caused this new turn in the 
destiny of the man? I think that we can discern 
three co-inciding events which fell together into 
this year and lit upon William Shakespeare, lead- 
ing him, hurtling him, or perchance gently caress- 
ing him into his future career. These three events 
we shall set down in a brief jotting. 

1. It was in the year 1588 that the Armada 
made its Quixotic assault, was overwhelmed chiefly 
by the sea's windmills, and practically destroyed. 
When this long-lowering menace had cleared away, 
not only England, but Northern Europe, we may 
say Civilization itself felt a great release, a new 
freedom. Till that universal terror was removed, 
no Englishman dared deem his outlook settled for 
life. And how could William Shakespeare, still a 
young man, think of fixing himself in a new call- 
ing while that Spanish fate hung over him and his 
nation? Very rapid was the passing of the storm 
after it once broke ; and though the King of Spain 
threatened England with fresh Armadas, they 



ANCnOBED. 117 

never again caused serious anxiety. So we con- 
ceive that our poet, along with his people and age, 
received a grand liberation which enabled him to 
turn back to his own individual work in life, ac- 
cording to the bent of his genius. What was that 
work? For now he first felt himself free to run 
his own life-line. 

2. The Elizabethan era had already begun to 
find its self-expression supremely in one form, the 
dramatic, as we have before emphasized. Now this 
was Shakespeare's native form of utterance, not 
yet developed, but lustily struggling to be born. 
Hence he found in the theatre of the time the con- 
genial place for his evolution. A number of ablo 
but preluding dramatists had already broken the 
v^^ay, and with these he became intergrown, having 
formed an early personal acquaintance. Thus he 
breathed the very atmosphere of his age 's germinal 
art, passing rapidly through its embryology to 
nascence and to maturity. 

3. In this general dramatic upburst rises a 
great personality with his one greatest work of the 
period, which work appeared in its completeness 
this same year (1588). The mighty drama of 
Tamburlane — mighty in size, in speech, and in con- 
ception — was the theatrical wonder as well as the 
revolutionary document of the time, defiant of 
tradition in every direction, especially of that of 
the old stage. Here we behold Marlowe as the 
grand precursor and primal trainer of Shake- 
speare. 



118 SHAKESPEAEE'S LIFE-DBAMA. 

We may well suppose that the hitherto drifting 
genius became fully anchored inside the task of the 
theater when Marlow's Tamhurlane had been pre- 
sented in both its Parts. It thundered to him what 
he was to do with himself, evoking a response from 
his deepest consciousness. That epochal drama must 
have produced a creative impression upon Shake- 
speare, then twenty-four years old, as he watched 
its power over the audience, and also pondered its 
poetic text. It could not help giving an enormous 
impulse to his productive ambition. Doubtless he 
became acquainted with jMarlowe himself, and they 
began to collaborate together. Such was the new 
and greatest training school of Shakespeare's ap- 
prenticeship — the genius of Christopher Marlowe, 
with whom he will remain for years, in fact till the 
latter 's tragic taking off from life's own stage. 

These were the two mighty personalities with 
whom Shakespeare came into living contact during 
the first four or five years of his London discipline 
— Burbage the actor and Marlowe the poet. Other 
writers doubtless influenced him, such as Kyd, 
Green, Lyly — all belonging to the new order and 
its dramatic expression. 

Thus Shakespeare gets located in London, and 
has found his life's supreme vocation, being ready 
to take his first leap into his own living drama, or 
perhaps it was a slow transition. At this point we 
are enforced to look back and to survey his mental 
equipment, especially the intellectual material 
which he brought from Stratford. 



ANCHOBED. 119 

First was the means for tapping the lore of the 
Renascence, the age's great cultural movement. 
This, as we have seen, was what had been specially 
imparted to him in the Stratford School, and will 
weave through and tint poetically his whole dra- 
matic career. It is clear that he kept up his study- 
habit, and never let his Latin drop from memory, 
adding to it some knowledge of two Romanic mod- 
ern tongues, Italian and French. He knew and 
could employ Greek Mythology, especially in its 
Roman paramythical form, which he had found 
mainly in Ovid. Then his brain was a storehouse 
of popular legend, not gained from books so much 
as from hearsay and direct life ; we may call it the 
Anglo-Saxon Mythus, which he employs in nu- 
merous ways, not only in passing allusion and 
illustration, but as an overworld of spirits, fairies, 
ghosts. We may whisper here that this mythical 
element is usually neglected by our worthy com.- 
mentators, but Shakespeare's poetic personality 
cannot be fully grasped without it ; he deeply par- 
took of it, inside him it lay ever active and organic, 
and was not something on the outside, dragged in 
by sheer force for the sake of external ornament. 

We must reaffirm our belief that he brought 
along not a few attempts at verse, poetic materials 
which he will draw upon often in the future. 
Recollect that he was twenty-one years old when he 
set out for London ; it were impossible for a poetic 
genius to remain dormant during its springtime. 
Also many an experience of travel and of nature hie 



120 SHAKESPEABE'S LIFE-DRAMA. 

had gathered at Stratford, and will transmute into 
his coming dramatic expression; this personal ex- 
perience is his true autobiography, not indeed sep- 
arately set forth in its own shape, but disguised 
under its dramatic mask, which was the poet's 
native method of revealing himself. To be sure, 
this subtle self-revelation the reader must unmask 
and sleuth through all its devious windings and 
concealments, if he wishes to commune directly 
with the personality of the poet. 

It should never quit the mind that Shakespeare's 
love of the Mythus was inborn, a constituent part 
of his nature, which always streams through 
his utterance in one form or other. Indeed Shake- 
speare himself has been called a Mythus, which 
statement about him is true enough if conceived in 
the right way. His total deed has an epical 
grandeur, and builds itself into one monumental 
poem of which he is the hero, and in whose expres- 
sion he shows himself the voice of the Gods or of 
the Eternal Powers. Hence his biography, if it 
presents him truthfully and wholly, will not fail to 
interweave in its own right a mythical or imagina- 
tive element, as the very essence of the creative 
poet. But this must consciously tell what it is. 
unmasking its self-identity. 

Here, then, we let the curtain fall upon the Pro- 
logue of the poet's Life-drama in which we have 
sought to set forth the main features of his earlj' 
education and experience, till his flight from his 
confining life at little Stratford into the great 



ANCnOBED. ]21 

world of London, where he is fully to discover him- 
self in and through his new dramatic vocation. 
Accordingly we are now to pass into the literal 
drama of this Life-drama of his, which is next to 
be witnessed unfolding out of its many separate 
constituents into a full-rounded entirety of human 
achievement. Here, then, closes our Prologue, for 
whose farewell words we may again cite the dra- 
matist's own brief blazon of himself, proclaiming 
his art to be as universal as life itself: 

All the world's a stage. 
And all the men and women merely players. 

Indeed he calls the world the '^universal theatre" 
in the play (As You Like It) from which the fore- 
going extract is taken, intoning his pathetic words 
with the soulful music of consolation : 

We are not all alone unhappy: 
This wide and universal theatre 
Presents more woeful pageants than the scene 
In which we play in. 



Preliminary Survey. 

Thus we seek to unite into one comprehensive 
word with its corresponding thought all the playy 
of William Shakespeare, thirty six of them, in 
whic?i his Life-drama completely dramatizes itself 
from start to fulfilment. An unusual word but 
much needed for clarity and completeness of com- 
prehension is this Pan-drama, which is always to 
call up in the mind and to enforce Shakespeare's 
dramatic achievement as a whole, or the concept of 
all his dramas taken together. Moreover their pro- 
duction and representation belong to the one local- 
ity, London, and show the poet's evolution for 
nearly a quarter of a century. 

I. Now this London Pan-drama has met with a 

stroke of exceeding good-luck : it was printed seven 

years after the poet 's death in a single book known 

to all the world as the First Folio, whose date is 

(122) 



PEELIMINABY SUBVET. 123 

1623. Probably, if the question could be submitted 
to an election, this volume would receive more 
votes, choosing it the sovereign of greatest Eu- 
ropean books, than any other writing. Two actor- 
friends, John Heminge and Henry Condell, took 
charge of the work, and say of themselves in their 
dedication: "We have but collected them [the 
plays] and done an office to the dead ; ' ' whereupon 
these editors still more strongly stress the personal 
side: "without ambition either of self-profit or 
fame; only to keep the memory of so worthy a 
friend and fellow alive, as was our Shakespeare," 
have they done their labor of love. In such state- 
ments we catch an echo of Shakespeare's per- 
sonality, as it influenced his nearest friends, and 
was held in memory and gratitude after his 
decease. 

It is also worth while to note how these two 
editors, though actors by profession and theatre- 
owners, make their ultimate appeal not to the acted 
but to the read Shakespeare, as if they foresaw that 
the future of their poet lay with his vast reading 
multitude more than with his theatre-going con- 
stituency. Their exhortation still holds good of his 
book: "it is yours that read him." And their 
faith in his eternal portion seems proclaimed : ' ' for 
his wit can no more lie hid, than it could be lost. ' ' 
They also emphasize that Shakespeare is not gotten 
with a single perusal: "read him, therefore; and 
again, and again. ' ' They also imply that he is not 
so easy, for if, after several trials, ' ' you do not like 



124 SEAKESPEABE'S LIFE-DBAMA. 

him, surely you are in some manifest danger not 
to understand him. ' ' And what is stranger, they 
suggest even guidance in the study of him: ''we 
leave you to other of his friends, whom if you need, 
can be your guides." A far-off hint, one may 
fancy, of our modern Shakespeare clubs, with their 
guides! Still the best way is that ''you can lead 
yourselves, and others," for every reader must 
finally be his own interpreter. ' ' And such readers 
we wish him, ' ' is their farewell word to their Book. 
And we believe that this is Shakespeare 's own view 
of his whole work finally glimpsed from his retire- 
ment at Stratford. 

From the drift of this prefatory address ' ' To the 
great Variety of Readers", as it stands in front of 
the First Folio, we have the right to infer that the 
grand Shakespearian reading-army of the ages had 
already given evidence of itself in contrast with the 
theatre-going public. This is not saying that the 
histrionic side of Shakespeare is to be neglected; 
the drama is the art-form into which he pours his 
greatest, and, besides, has its own independent 
worth as well as right of existence. Still we are 
to note here that these professional actors of Shake- 
speare, who are also his intimate personal friends, 
recognize that the poet's deeper appeal is to the 
individual reader communing with himself and free 
of the attractions and distractions of the stage. 
That such was also the view of the poet himself, 
we shall find suggested in a number of his plays. 
Already Hamlet speaks of two Hamlets, the one 



PBELIMINABY SUBVEY. 125 

who is or may be staged, and the other who exists 
beyond the stage, the showable and the unshowable 
man, or the outer and the inner of him : 

these indeed seem, 
For they are actions that a man might play; 
But I have that within which passeth show, 
These but the trappings and the suits of woe. 

So even the theatre-loving Hamlet declares that 
there is a something in him beyond the external 
representation. Still just that deeper internal 
Hamlet is what the Hamlet drama has to impart 
ultimately to its reader. 

The appearance of this First Folio of collected 
Shakespeare was evidently regarded as a supreme 
literary event at the time. The Book revealing 
the total poet was hailed as a grand new epiphany 
of him, far more significant than any of his single 
dramas hitherto acted or printed. Prefixed to the 
First Folio is a little poetic fascicle of eight lines 
by a nameless bard who celebrates the 'Book as the 
dramatist 's re-entrance after death into his new 
theatre, the immortal one: 

We thought thee dead, but this thy 

printed worth, 
Tells thy spectators, that thou went'st 

but forth 
To enter with applause 

in order to play thy eternal role. And the Eliza- 
bethan poet next in merit to Shakespeare, Ben 



126 SHAKESPE ABE'S LIFE-DRAMA. 

Jonson, lauds the Book in addressing its departed 
author : 

My Shakespeare, rise! 

Thou art a monument without a tomb, 
And art alive still while thy Book doth live, 
And we have wits to read and praise to give. 

Evidently Jonson, knowing the man well, saw him 
rise out of the grave to new life in his Book some 
seven years after his entombment. Still another 
cotemporary rhyme by Leonard Digges hymns us 

. . , When that stone is rent. 
And Time dissolves thy Stratford Monument, 
Here we alive shall view thee still. This Book, 
When brass and marble fade, shall make 

thee look 
Fresh to all Ages. 

In such exaltation Shakespeare's friends and fel- 
low-actors hail this First Folio as the poet's resur- 
rection to life everlasting, and posterity has more 
than sealed their judgment not only with its ap- 
proval but with a kind of consecration. 

Another point suggested by these extracts we 
may not omit. This Book, gigantic as it is, must 
be finally won and realized by the reader as a 
whole of a human life, the completed self-expres- 
sion of its author. While it gives the world in 
which he lives, it at the same time gives himself in 
his very selfhood ; it is fundamentally biographical. 
In fact it will be read at last as an autobiography. 



PBELIMINABT SUBVET. 127 

masking in its thousand characters one ultimate 
colossal personality, which it is our problem to 
unmask and to commune with as soul to soul. 

From these as well as numerous other evidences, 
the inference seems co-ercive that the publication 
of the First Folio had its origin and its early- 
preparation largely from Shakespeare himself. He 
must have long known the lasting value of his work, 
for it had been told him a thousand times by the 
best judges, and he must have started to collect and 
to edit his scattered and incomplete writings. 
What else was he doing at Stratford during his last 
four years of leisure, when he would naturally be 
looking backward and measuring his life's full 
span of achievements? Already he had experi- 
enced the enduring import of the typed book for 
keeping his work alive and ever creative. The 
Quarto editions of his plays never lapsed from 
print, though they were mostly ''stolen and sur- 
reptitious copies, maimed and deformed by the 
frauds and stealths of injurious impostors", as 
they are branded by the indignant editors of the 
First Folio, Heminge and Condell. Here we may 
possibly catch an echo of Shakespeare's own rea- 
son for a new edition of his already published 
plays "cured and perfect of their limbs", which 
stolen and printed plays according to the usual 
tally amount to sixteen out of the thirty-six. Then 
the continued demand for his two early narrative 
poems, Venus and Adonis and Lucrece, which he 
had issued under his own name, must have strongly 



128 SEAKESPE ABE'S LIFE-DEAMA. 

impressed him with the need of printing his dramas 
also. Not a few writers try to show him altogether 
neglectful and loveless toward the children of his 
brain, though the noblest of their kind ; but I 
refuse to believe him so indifferent to his own im- 
mortality, which he himself often celebrates in 
his loftiest prophetic vision (as in Sonnet 81) : 

Your monument shall be my gentle verse 
Which eyes not yet created shall o 'er-read, 
And tongues to be your being shall rehearse 
When all the breathers of this world are dead; 
You still shall live — such virtue has my pen — 
Where breath most breathes — e'en in the 
mouths of men. 

Now whosoever this sonneted You may be — 
woman, man, or possibly the poet's own Genius — 
it is Shakespeare's verse which imparts immor- 
tality to the mortal object, be this a he, she, or it. 
and his verse is evidently to endure through the 
printed page which eyes unborn ' ' shall o 'er-read. ' ' 

At this point we should remember that the 
earlier poetic efforts of Shakespeare other than 
dramatic — quite a cluster of poems epical and 
lyrical — were not included in this First Folio, 
whose title-page announces only "Comedies, His- 
tories, and Tragedies, published according to the 
true original copies." Nor was this non-dramatic 
poetry of Shakespeare taken into the three later 
Folios; it was also omitted in the early editions. 
To Edmund Malone is assigned the credit of edit- 



PBELIMINABY SUEVEY. 129 

ing and printing the first complete edition of all 
Shakespeare's works in 1790, embracing both the 
plays and the poems. Such is the entire content of 
the poet's Book, as we see it everywhere to-day. 
Still the First Folio of 1623 is not only the main 
structure but the overarching dome of the whole 
Shakespearian edifice. 

Another fact about this unique Book stirs all 
sorts of wonderings; for instance, twenty of his 
plays, some of them among his greatest, it printed 
for the first time. How was this precious literary 
treasure preserved and by whom? Did not all 
the theater's manuscripts perish when the G-lobe 
burned down very suddenly in 1612? Anyhow 
Julius Caesar was saved as well as Antony and 
Cleopatra and also Macbeth, along with seventeen 
others, if not from literal flames, at least from the 
fires of time, since every trace of the "original 
copies", which evidently lay before these first 
editors, has vanished. And it may be added that 
the dramas of one entire Period of the poet 's life, 
five of them all together, were rescued from fate 
by the print of that First Folio. These are the 
later Shakespeare's works of reconciliation, the 
dramas of repentance and redemption, the so-called 
Romantic Tragi-comedies. 

Enough for the present about this unique World- 
Book as we may signalize it, whose author the rare 
cotemporaneous Ben Jonson had already acclaimed 
as eternal, foretelling 

He was not of an age, but for all time! 



130 SHAKESPE ABE'S LIFE-DBAMA. 

This First Folio has naturally given rise to 
much spinning of conjecture; it provokes in its 
very look all sorts of reflections, and even of fan- 
tasies. We seek to glimpse its environing condi- 
tions, and to follow out all the little rills of sug- 
gestion, which rise and stream through it and 
around it, and embosom it on every side. But es- 
pecially in the center of this vast and intricate 
dramatic web, we search to behold the spiritual 
visage of the poet himself peering through, as it 
were from behind his thousandfold creations, which 
at times he seems to idealize as his own outflung 
shadows. Thus, when he interrogates himself 
(Sonnet 53) with deep yearning, he drives his 
reader to make the same quest of him: 

What is your substance, whereof you are made. 
That millions of strange shadows on you tend? 
And you but one, can every shadow lend. 

II. Next comes the problem of putting into 
some kind of biographic order and organisation 
this Book, which as the one all-including Shake- 
spearian Pan-drama, must have its own divisions 
and subdivisions, or its own acts and scenes, whose 
junctures are to reveal the movement and also the 
build of the poet's total Life-drama. Already the 
First Folio in its table of contents gives promi- 
nently its classification of itself into three main 
parts — Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies — under 
which heads are aranged all the plays (ex- 
cept one, seemingly by chance omitted). More- 



PBELIMINABY SUBVEY. 131 

over Shakespeare himself in his Hamlet makes al- 
lusion to the same division, which he has received 
from the aforetime — the dramatized History being 
peculiarly, though not exclusively, English, for it 
was already known to old Aeschylus. But such a 
classification pertains to the art-form and hence is 
essentially formal, giving no deeper clew to the 
relation of the separate plays to the poet's own 
evolution. In fact we shall find that the young 
Shakespeare in his early period wrote all three 
kinds of drama, comic, historic, tragic, and likewise 
made exploring incursions into several other poetic 
territories besides the dramatic. 

Hence we shall have to employ a different method 
and a different nomenclature for our biographic 
purpose. We shall seek, first of all, to periodize 
the poet's life-work in full accord with its inner 
process and fulfilment. That is, the present Shake- 
spearian Pan-drama falls into three great Periods 
of unfolding itself along with its poet, three inter- 
related phases of one total round of human achieve- 
ment, which in a general way we may conceive as 
rise, culmination, and descent, or the morning, 
noontide and afternoon of his one great creative 
day of life. But such similes are only an outer 
brief scaffolding to help us construct the real 
building. 

Now these three Periods of Shakespeare's pro- 
ductivity are not only very diverse in their con- 
tents, but also they differ much in the clearness of 
their scope and in the definiteness of their limits. 



132 SHAKESPE ABE'S LIFE-DBAMA. 

As we are now purposing to give in advance a mere 
forecasting sketch of these Periods, which is to be 
filled out later, we shall first take the one of the 
three which can be marked off most distinctly in its 
boundary lines. This is his Second or purely 
Tragic Period lasting from about 1600-1 till 1609, 
that is some eight or more, probably nine years. 
Out of his previous very diversified and mueh- 
scattered activity, not only in the drama but also 
in other kinds of poetry, he passes to his unified, 
homogeneous, concentrated Period (this Second 
one) in which not only his world- view, but his very 
consciousness turns mightily and undividedly 
tragic. It is rightly deemed the masterful cul- 
mination of his Genius, bringing forth his greatest 
writ, if not the greatest writ of all time hitherto; 
for now his previously discursive Pan-drama of 
many kinds gathers itself up into one all-burning 
focus and becomes his Titanic Pan-tragedy, as we 
may word it in its distinctive character. This 
Period overarches the poet's middle time of life, 
say from thirty-six to forty-five, doubtless the 
mightiest of all his years. Nine single tragedies we 
place here, first to be separately taken up and or- 
dered, then finally to be conceived and organized 
as one supreme work, as the poet's one colossal 
Pan-tragedy of human existence. 

So much for the Second Period. The next, in 
clarity and definiteness of its periodic outline, is, to 
our mind, the Third Period of Shakespeare's dra- 
matic achievement. It covers but a few years, per- 



PBELIMINABY SUBVET. 133 

haps only three or four, and may be regarded as 
closing with the poet's last dramatic composition, 
about 1612-13. But the tone, the mood, even the 
meter changes; the action ends not now in death 
but in soul-healing restoration. Moreover the poet 
shows a return to his First Period, dropping 
Tragedy and taking up again Comedy and even 
History, if we add his Henry VIII. And yet with 
a deep difference of the spirit. The pervasive 
thought is now that of repentance, reconciliation, 
redemption. Out of his tragic world the poet has 
unfolded into a mediatorial conception of life, and 
his Pan-dramatic evolution ends happily in a new 
reconciled species of play which may be suggest- 
ively named Tragi-comedy, hyphenating its two 
clashing elements as overcome and harmonized in 
mutual mediation. Thus the Life-drama of Shake- 
speare as a whole winds up peacefully as one vast 
finished drama of reconciliation, in which he shows 
himself harmonious with the world 's regnant spirit 
and with himself. 

Having thus indicated the drift of the Second 
and Third Periods, we come finally to the First, 
altogether the most copious, heterogeneous, and 
hence difficult to bring into any kind of trans- 
parent order. Thus it stands in striking contrast 
to the two later Periods of the poet as already out- 
lined. Twenty-two plays lie here, seemingly a 
tangled mass of youth's dramatic luxuriance, the 
riotous outgrowth of poetic young-manhood revel- 
ing in its primal creative fertility, which ranges 



134 SHAKESPE ABE'S LIFE-DBAMA. 

in freedom from its twenty-fourth (or possibly- 
earlier) year till its thirty-sixth. At the first 
glance it seems out of place to put so many dramas 
into the First Period and so few into the Second, 
against all the commentators by the way. But we 
must recollect that Hamlet, for instance, of the 
Second Period equals about three plays of the size 
of the Comedy of Errors of the First Period, and it 
probably cost the author thrice three times as much 
human experience as well as intellectual labor for 
its creation. Hence the poet's tragic Period may 
well exhibit his greatest and most intensive outlay 
both of body and of soul, of physical vigor as well 
as a psychical energy. 

Thus we construe the London Pan-drama of 
Shakespeare, primarily emphasizing its three grand 
divisions, which we call Periods, each of which, has 
its own distinct character and movement as well 
as organisation, yet forms but one part or con- 
stituent of the total work. Here it is in place to 
re-state briefly for future guidance, and to set 
down the three cardinal Periods in their due order : 

First Period — that of the young man overflowing 
with an exuberant creativity in divers directions, 
testing himself variously, learning and unfolding 
his art and himself, always striving and advancing 
toward his highest goal, that of complete self- 
realisation, but not yet quite getting there — so we 
may call the present Period from this point of view 
his Apprenticeship, that stage of the poet's evolu- 
tion which comes before and leads up to Master- 



PBELIMINABY SUBVET. 135 

ship. Moreover it is in the main a time of happj^, 
easy, and exuberant productivity; the prevailing 
mood is that of Comedy, though with dark and 
even tragic streaks darting through it here and 
there. Hence this is essentially the poet 's variable, 
miscellaneous Period, comic on the whole, in spite 
of manifold divagations on other lines. 

Second Period — that of his middle life, and espe- 
cially of his central and sovereign activity, his 
Mastership. Herein he shows himself in conflict 
with himself and with his world, quitting his previ- 
ous diversity and concentrating upon one dramatic 
form, the tragic, and thus confining himself to the 
one highest domain of his art, Tragedy. Hence 
this is singly and withoout exception his Tragic 
Period, and the poet in spirit becomes as tragic as 
any of his characters, or perchance as all of them 
together. But he gets able to free himself of their 
fates by his remedial power of self-expression, and 
therein of self-realisation. 

Third Period — that of his later years, in which 
there is a return out of his dark tragic depths to a 
sunnier view of life, to his deeply serious yet 
happy-ending Comedy; thus we may give it the 
compounded title of Tragi-comedy, with its re- 
pentance, reconciliation, redemption. Shorter in 
time and far less intense than the preceding Period, 
it nevertheless rounds out his life's cycle to its 
final spiritual fulfilment, as well as to its formal 
psychological completeness. 



136 SHAKESPE ABE'S LIFE-DBAMA. 

Thus we seek to mark down in advance the 
grand turns or the capital joints in the large and 
complicated organism of the London Pan-drama of 
Shakespeare. Only thus can we catch and com- 
mune with his vast and varying and ever evolving 
personality, as we witness the mighty movement of 
his soul realising itself fully in its native form, 
which is the dramatic. But underneath the dra- 
matic form lurks ever the psychical, which is the 
deepest and most universal element of man and 
the world, and of which the drama is simply one 
mode of utterance through art. Moreover we may 
well put strong and repeated emphasis upon the 
present periodizing of the poet's life and work, 
since this field of Shakespearian exposition has been 
generally slighted, or radically misunderstood by 
our worthy expositors of Shakespeare. 

And here we must not fail of the reflection that 
this completed Shakespeare, this one monumental 
Pan-drama of the poet has never been acted as an 
entirety, and is not likely to be so acted very soon, 
under present theatrical conditions. It has to be 
served us in little units or atoms, known as single 
plays, out of which the whole organism is built. 
Still the supreme object of Shakespearian study is 
to get acquainted with the entire spiritual struc- 
ture of the man in his total achievement, and to 
contemplate him not alone in separate passages, 
characters and dramas, but in his complete organic 
realisation, builded not merely of parts inde- 
pendent outwardly, but of members interdependent 



FEEL1M.INAEY SUEVEY. 137 

and intergrown inwardly to his one finished Life- 
drama. 

Long ago it was said that a little extract or 
speech from Hamlet was no more able to give the 
idea of the play as a whole than a single brick 
coald show the nature of the building of which it 
was a part. But the comparison should be car- 
ried up higher : the single play, even .great Hamlet, 
is but one room, even if the most spacious of all, 
in the poet's world-edifice here called the London 
Pan-drama; and the best reader must endeavor as 
his ultimate aim not only to live in but to live the 
full Shakespearian commonwealth peopled with 
its thousand eternized characters. 

Accordingly we have taken our first perch upon 
the very dome of this lofty dramatic structure, 
and thence have cast our preliminary outlook, 
where the view is clearest and simplest. Young 
Shakespeare, with head full of unwritten poetry 
and pocket full of written verses we have conceived 
as he set out from Stratford, and we have glimpsed 
him plucking the delicious fruit of his first London 
experience. But his true vocation now begins in 
earnest, and we are to thread his somewhat laby- 
rinthine ascent to the summit of his Genius, where 
a new and different spectacle sweeps into vision. 



FIRST PERIOD. 

Apprenticeship. 

During a dozen years or more Shakespeare was 
in training to reach his highest self-expression in 
the drama. Hence all this time he remained a kind 
of apprentice to his art, though a great one, per- 
chance the greatest ! So it comes that we now apply 
to him the term Apprenticeship, in order to indi- 
cate the unfinished poet as compared with himself 
at his topmost achievement, which he is to attain 
in the next Period. Not yet has he quite fulfilled 
himself, though we may consider him at times more 
interesting and more brilliant as a learner than as 
a graduate. This primary, grandly preparatory 
stage of the total London Pan-drama we inscribe as 
his First Period, which we date between the years 
1588 and 1600, without insisting too pedantically 
upon the exact year fore or aft. 

And since the poet during this Apprenticeship 
is ever the searcher and self-evolver, we shall en- 
deavor to designate him by certain salient ad- 
(138) 



APPBENTICESHIP 139 

jectives, as we may catch a glimpse of him in his 
changeful development. He is now the versatile 
Protean Shakespeare, capable of many transforma- 
tions ; he shows himsel f the investigator, the tester, 
the experimentalist along various poetic lines, try- 
ing them all on his Genius, to see which fits best. 
Assimilative, too, we must mark him, creatively 
assimilative, not merely swallowing his lore in 
erudite masses. Also we may conceive this as his 
pre-tragic Period, in which the Tragedy is as yet 
implicit despite some prophetic upbursts. 

Looking at the poet's literary output of this 
Period we find it very multiform, consisting of 
many species of composition. It is for him a time 
of vast and varied experiences of the world about 
him, and especially a time of putting his diversified 
life into art. His spirit delights in trying every 
poetic form as the vehicle of his deeper creations, 
particularly of his human characters, with which 
this Pan-drama of his overflows, as if it were a 
well-built city containing a ghostly but ever-living 
population, a veritable Shakespearopolis. 

All educated people are now supposed to know 
Shakespeare's characters, at least the leading ones 
of his dramatic commonwealth. They are our 
familiar acquaintances, with whom we seem more 
intimately associated than with the famous per- 
sonages of history. Already in the Public School 
our young folks obtain their unforgettable intro- 
duction to Julius Caesar the greatest Roman, to 
Hamlet the most famous Dane, to Portia who can 



140 SHAKESPE ABE'S LIFE-DRAMA 

talk Latin, and to other ladies and gentlemen of 
old and new renown. These characters live for us 
more authoritatively than the Presidents of the 
United States, with perhaps two or three excep- 
tions. The poet has made them immortal, as if 
he tapped the creative source of individuality it- 
self, and turned it to flow into his new human 
mould. You may know the ideal Hamlet better 
than you know any breathing idealist, and there is 
probably more of him to be known. But we seek 
not merely to get acquainted with Shakespeare's 
created shapes, however masterful and multitu- 
dinous, but we also long to see the creator himself 
in his workshop creating or perchance re-creating 
immortal souls for his poetic commonwealth, and 
thus immortalizing himself in action as world- 
builder. 

Another suggestion, though more intelligible 
later, should not be omitted here at the beginning : 
this Apprenticeship is a part of a greater whole, 
of a total life-sweep whose threefold process should 
be grasped if we are fully to understand any one 
of the poet's works. For he wrote each of them 
from his entire Self; he was at the start potentially 
all that he afterwards became in reality. What he 
is to be lies already fermenting in his early poems, 
and the interpretation should give at least a 
glimpse of the total Shakespeare in each part or 
drama. There lurks in every atom of the man the 
possibility of his whole career and of its process as 
fulfilled, which we are now seeking to envisage. 



APPEENTICESHIP 141 

Accordingly we must next take up and put into 
some kind of order this long and complex Ap- 
prenticeship with its twenty-two plays and with its 
divers other poems. As already set forth, it em- 
braces the First Period of the poet's London Pan- 
drama, and divides itself into three distinctive 
Epochs, which we shall name (1) Collaboration, 
(2) Imitation, (3) Origination. We hope that in 
these titles the inquisitive reader may catch before- 
hand a little hint of the poet's inner movement 
toward his goal. It should be forewarned that 
these divisions both interlace and overlap, and 
hence cannot be rigidly fixed in annual limits. 
Still they mark the dominant tendencies or per- 
chance the three larger successive surges up to- 
ward the crest of his Genius. This First Period 
also represents the poet's wrestle with tradition, 
which at the start he appropriates immediately, 
then imitates independently, and finally transfig- 
ures to originality. 



142 SHAKESPEARE'S LIFE-DBAMA. 



CHAPTER FIRST. 

COLLABORATION. 

The primal act of Shakespeare's dramatic au- 
thorship was his partnership in play-making, 
whereby two or more were co-operant in one piece. 
He felt himself not yet ready to start on his own 
account and to compose an independent work; he 
became the young co-worker with others, who were 
his early practical teachers. Hence his first Epoch 
was one of Collaboration, in which he is learning, 
through the help of more experienced writers for 
the theater, to get hold of the transmitted dramatic 
form, to win stage-craft and to dramatize a theme 
for the public. This earliest enterprise of the poet 
has its one chief literary document in the historic 
trilogy of Henry VI, out of which Richard III un- 
folds imitatively. Hence the present Epoch brings 
before us the embryonic Shakespeare, the germinal 
dramatist in his first shape. 

The time was dramatic ; the sovereign Elizabeth 
was dramatic, especially in her conflict with Mary 
Queen of Scotland; the nation became a drama in 
its struggle with Spain, having a tragic outlook 
for a while yet with happy ending. This national 
round through tragedy back to peace we shall find 
to lurk in the poet's total Life-drama, hereafter to 
be explicitly set forth. There can be no doubt that 
the young poet, in this choice of his life's task, had 



COLLABORATION 143 

felt the deepest and mightiest literary pulse-beat 
of the age. It was just the English consciousness 
which turned dramatic and found its supreme ex- 
pression in theatrical presentation. Some fifty 
dramatic poets have been counted in the fifty years 
of what may be called the Shakespearian age, and 
probably there were many more, lesser and least. 
The outburst was national, indeed it was more; it 
had, as we now see, an universal import. 

These dramatists, wild and wayward on the 
whole, lived not the regular prescribed life of the 
community, but were in a state of protest, of de- 
fiance — a lawless lot, daring trespassers of the tra- 
ditional order, spendthrifts, deep drinkers haunting 
the alehouse and the brothel. As the supreme 
type of this class, the young Titan Christopher 
Marlowe may be listed. Shakespeare was in the 
whirl, and experienced it thoroughly ; still we have 
the right to say that it never controlled him, cer- 
tainly he never let it submerge him, as it did quitfe 
all his malcontent fellow-poets headed by Marlowe. 
But he knew well through the reality the conflict 
between appetite and reason, between blood and 
judgment, or senses and spirit. Indeed the first 
clash of his poetical life-battle was the aspiring 
youth's ever-recurring collision of originality 
supposed or actual, against tradition. 

England in the time of Shakespeare was realiz- 
ing her supreme national endowment, her will- 
energy, and so she loved especially to behold her- 
self in the deed. The drama presents man in 



144 SHAKESPEARE'S LIFE-DBAMA. 

action. She had defeated the Armada and had 
asserted herself against the greatest power of Eu- 
rope. Now the budding receptive poet, our young 
Shakespeare, has been whelmed into this upheaval 
of the nation at its very center, and starts to mak- 
ing himself its enduring voice both in form and 
substance. 

At this national center, which is the city of Lon- 
don, there has been gathering and evolving the 
crude material for the new English drama; we 
may call it the dramatic protoplasm, out of which 
is to be shaped by the right artificer the coming 
Pan-drama of Anglo-Saxondom. Such is the pri- 
mordial genetic point at which we shall seek to 
catch some glimpse of this new creation in the 
beginning, of which again we are to hearken the 
world-forming word, as here too "in the beginning 
was the word. ' ' 

Thus we summon before us the incipient poet, 
the coming play-maker Shakespeare limned in a 
rather dreamy dawn-light, as collaborator, working 
in intimate, quite indistinguishable conjunction 
with his fellow-dramatists, he being not yet fully 
individualized in his product or in himself. His 
personality glints out here and there in fitful 
flashes, and then it seems to drop back absorbed 
into the time's primordial mass without distinc- 
tive outline. So let us watch during a little mo- 
ment for the sake of the future, the embryonic 
Shakespeare swimming in his protoplasmic sea, 
and then sinking in it for a spell till he rise out of 



EAKLT FELLOW-DBAMATISTS 145 

it and receive the seal of his creative individuality 
stamped ineffaceably upon his separate works. 



Early Fellow-Dramatists. 

Shakespeare, when he first dropped down upon 
London's dramatic territory, found it already pre- 
empted and cultivated by a band of intrepid 
forward-pushing pioneers, who had in their domain 
all the challenging dare-deviltry of the frontiers- 
man. These became his primal teachers and 
exemplars, whose lesson he had to learn, embody 
in writ, and then transcend. It is now in place 
to give a brief record of this initial experience of 
the oncoming dramatist, for its influence stayed 
with him till his last penstroke. Here follow the 
names and the chief doings of these defiant world- 
stormers. 

1. The first writer to be called up in this con- 
nection is the author of Hieronymo and The 
Spanish Tragedy, two sanguinary and thunderous 
plays, or rather one play in two parts usually 
assigned to Thomas Kyd, though with a question 
mark. Of the life of this man nothing definitely 
is known; even his date cannot be fixed, yet it 
must have been before Shakespeare's dramatic en- 
trance in 1587-8, for till then Kyd's dramas and 
his spirit had dominated the London stage, when 
their supremacy was challenged by Marlowe 's Tam- 
hurlaine. And the name of Kyd yet lives as the 



146 SHAKESPEARE'S LIFE-DRAMA. 

originator, or at least the best exponent of that 
dramatic species still to-day known and even 
popular as the blood-and-thunder Tragedy. But 
our interest now is to note that the young learner 
Shakespeare took up into himself this sort of 
Tragedy with an immortal sympathy, though he 
kept transforming and ennobling it in accord with 
his own inner life-long evolution. His Titus An- 
dronicus is an early witness to Kyd's influence, 
though this play has been denied him against all 
valid evidence. It has likewise been supposed that 
Kyd wrote in his manner the first crude and 
bloody Hamlet Tragedy, which our poet got to 
know at this time, but after many years' brooding 
he elevated and transfigured it into its present 
dramatic sovereignty. 

Also from Kyd's grandiosity of expression 
Shakespeare may have first caught somewhat of 
that Oceanic roll of human speech wherein he be- 
came the supreme master, even if he too sometimes 
swells over into turgidity like his prototype. Still 
such high-sounding magniloquence was a general 
urge of the time, and fails not of its appeal to-day. 

2. More nearly co-temporaneous with Shake- 
speare than with Kyd were several dramatists who 
are usually grouped together — Greene, Peele, 
Nash and Lodge — to whom we may add Euphu- 
istic Lyly and Titanic Marlowe. They were 
all University men, classically trained, and prided 
themselves upon their good education as well as 
their good blood with a kind of aristocratic dis- 



EABLY FELLOW -DB AM AT 1ST S I47 

dain — in which matters they showed quite a con- 
trast to the more rural and less learned, but far 
more original Shakespeare. On the other hand 
they were a dissipated, reckless, usually moneyless 
set of Bohemians, with the exception of Lyly ; they 
butted their heads against social tradition, and 
held aloof from Elizabeth 's court, leading the life 
of gay lawless vagabonds, a right Falstaffian rab- 
ble of gifted literary bummers hanging around 
the taverns and underworldly purlieus of London. 

It so happens that one of these maddened fel- 
low-dramatists has handed down to us the first co- 
temporary allusion to Shakespeare during the 
aforesaid early London years. This is Robert 
Greene, who has vented his anger and envy upon 
the newcomer and evidently victorious rival in the 
following jet of venom : ' ' There is an upstart crow 
beautified with our feathers" (he has stolen our 
trade) "that with his Tiger's heart wrapt in a 
Player's hide" (adapted from Shakespeare's First 
Henry VI) ''supposes he is as well able to bum- 
bast out a blank verse" (Marlowe's new dramatic 
meter) ' ' as the best of you ; and being an absolute 
Johannes Factotum" (skillful both as writer and 
player, and possibly as manager) "is, in his own 
conceit, the only Shake-scene in a country. ' ' Here 
the evident allusion is to Shakespeare's name, 
noted source of much punning fertility. The book 
from which this passage is taken, Greene's Groats- 
worth of Wit, belongs to the year 1592, and very 
distinctly heralds that Shakespeare in a few years 



148 SHAKESPE ABE'S LIFE-DBAMA. 

had already won a commanding position in the 
theatrical world, outstripping his older fellow- 
dramatists. Especially his versatility (Johannes 
Factotum) is sneeringly emphasized, as well as 
his poetic power. Another fact we may rightly 
infer from his foe's bitter words: Shakespeare 
was well aware of his own transcendent ability, 
and probably would not fail to show his "conceit" 
if prodded a little. Doubtless the poet had al- 
ready come to a consciousness of his own Genius, 
as compared with his co-temporary craftsmen. 
These now unappreciated talents Greene advises 
to quit their old business and to withhold "your 
admired inventions, for it is pity men of such wits 
should be subject to the pleasures of such rude 
grooms." Yet with some of these writers Shakes- 
peare is supposed to have collaborated in his Henry 
VI. But the foregoing extract would seem to 
indicate that he had already risen out of that 
former phase of his dramatic evolution. 

Another glimpse of Shakespeare at this date is 
furnished by the play writer Henry Chettle who 
had published Greene's vicious attack. Only a 
few months later (December 1592) Chettle, in his 
Kind Hartes Dream, printed a very obsequious 
apology, evidently in response to the protests of 
the poet's friends: "I am as sorry as if the orig- 
inal fault had been mine because myself have seen 
his (Shakespeare's) demeanor", which the apolo- 
gist declares publicly to be "civil", duly acknowl- 
edging at the same time his excellence "in the 



EABLT FELLOW-DEAMATISTS 149 

quality he professes", which doubtless alludes to 
Shakespeare's profession of actor. Moreover "di- 
vers of worship have reported his uprightness of 
dealing" or his business honesty, as well as "his 
facetious grace in writing, which approves his art ' ' 
— a praise which seems, to mark the success of 
Shakespeare's comic Muse up to 1592-3. From 
these scattered strokes we catch a very favorable 
though sketchy picture of Shakespeare as gentle- 
man, business man, player, and writer, prosperous 
and even distinguished at the age of twenty-eight. 
It is the earliest of many tributes to his winning 
personality, of which we shall hereafter catch re- 
peated echoes. 

3. In this group of dissolute defiers of law, hu- 
man and divine, the central figure rises up in 
the towering Titan, Christopher Marlowe, often 
called the founder of English Tragedy, which he 
not only wrote but tragically lived. Shakespeare 
knew him, probably collaborated with him, but 
certainly imitated him, and for years kept as- 
similating not only his outward manner but his 
creative Genius. As we construe the relation be- 
tween these twin poetic grandeurs, Shakespeare's 
prime task in his early Apprenticeship was to 
take Up into himself and make his own the work 
and life of Marlowe, and then to transcend his 
master in both. Really the Shakespearian Pan- 
drama shows its Marlowese contribution not only 
at the start but at the finish. Already we have 
remarked several times this colossal figure sweep- 



150 SHAKESPEABE'S LIFE-DBAMA 

ing into young Shakespeare's horizon, and looming 
up as it were gigantically out of a primitive fog- 
world — and still more of him is to come. 

4. We have taken a short look at the English 
nation tossing in the throes of a new epoch which 
finds its unrestful, explosive utterance in the 
drama of the time. Some parallels may be cited. 
For in like manner ancient Greece, at the begin- 
ning of her great dramatic evolution, showed a vol- 
canic energj^ of conception and expression, as 
we may still see exemplified in her old poet Aeschy- 
lus. His Prometheus remains the primeval Titanic 
prototype of the divine Genius in revolt against 
the upper powers of Law and Institution, which 
through their supreme representative, Olympian 
Zeus, chained him in adamantine fetters to the 
inaccessible peak of Mount Caucasus. There he 
has to suffer for his defiance of the existing order, 
being branded as godless and a rebel, whose penalty 
is to feel the vulture ever clawing and gnawing his 
vitals. In a number of strokes Prometheus fore- 
casts a picture of Marlowe, who was in his life's 
outcome more tragic than any of his tragedies; 
indeed he was just their tragically fated hero. 
Aeschylus preludes his drama with the pitiless 
work of two elemental powers, Strength (Kratos) 
and Violence (Bia), whose nature may be heard 
resonant both in his thought and in his style, as 
well as in those of Marlowe, through whom Shake- 
speare was first made to feel "the right Prome- 
thean fire." 



EAELT FELLOW-DRAMATISTS 151 

More than a century ago arose a similar liter- 
ary epoch of Titanic upheaval and protest against 
the established world, which broke loose in Ger- 
many whereof the central figure was the young 
Goethe. It was known as the time of Storm and 
Stress {Sturm und Drang), heralding the first 
struggles and birth of the new German literature. 
Goethe studied both Aeschylus and Marlowe, and 
essayed to reproduce each of them in their master- 
pieces of defiance. So we read that he, during 
his supremely creative period, planned and in 
part, executed a new Prometheus; also he pored 
over Marlowe's Faustus, which he once thought 
of translating into German, and whose suggestive 
theme finally became his greatest work, his verit- 
able life-poem. Goethe like Shakespeare passed 
through and then transcended this stage of furious 
mental and social revolt, attaining to a recon- 
ciliation with the providential world-order, 
wherein he makes complete the spiritual cycle of 
his career, German critics have not failed to par- 
allel their Goethe-Schiller Storm and Stress, with 
the corresponding phenomenon in the Marlowe- 
Shakespeare evolution, though the two events and 
their poets show also a very distinctive unlike- 
ness, as mirroring two different peoples and ages. 

And here it would be a serious lapse in us not 
to record that our American Literature has shown 
and still shows striking prognostics of a similar 
stormful and stressful crisis in its development. 
Truly we are now living in a time of general liter- 



152 SB ARE SPE ABE'S LIFE-DBAMA.^ 

ary revolt against old traditions. We can to-day 
in our land catch glimpses of those ancient Greek, 
Aeschylean god-hammerers, Strength and Vio- 
lence ; again we can hear many a blast of the 
Goethean Storm and Stress roaring through the 
printed page; we may even see Elizabethan Mar- 
lowe once more rattling and writhing against his 
social and literary chains with a Titan's might 
and fate. Is not our Walt Whitman the modern 
twin-brother of Kit Marlowe, though so different in 
lore, in metrical music and in dramatic gift? 
Whitman towers up our foresent American Titan 
striving gigantically to get the ultimate poetic 
form for himself and his message. But for some 
reason or other our spiritual brain-storm and its 
cyclonic discipline have not yet given birth to 
an Aeschylus, or a Goethe, or a Shakespeare, or 
perchance a Marlowe. Is he yet to be shaped 
and to rise out of the present literary chaos of 
our well-leveled democratic mediocrity? 

Here we shall have to allow the interrogation 
mark to stand till all-erasing Time perchance 
scratch it out with his hour-glass. Meantime let 
us hurry on to the next landing-place for our 
poet. 

II. 
Henry VI. 

The cluster of plays, five of them all told, which 
gather around the name and the career of Henry 
VI, constitute the heart and nearly the whole of 



HENST VI. 153 

the Collaborative Epoch of Shakespeare. This we 
are now to regard not merely as a single fact, or 
an isolated work of the poet, but as an epochal 
stage of his life's unfolding toward its fulfilment. 
Moreover it is to be considered as the first form 
or the early substructure of his completed edifice, 
which we have called his Pan-drama. The lead- 
ing characteristic of this time is that the poet 
has hardly yet individualized himself, being still 
interfused with or absorbed in his co-laborers, 
even if we may often glimpse his striving per- 
sonality trying to free itself into its own distinc- 
tive utterance. 

Henry VI, English King of the House of 
Lancaster, throned already during his infancy, is 
dated 1422-1471, whose reign lasted therefore, 
nearly half a century. The ruler of a turbu- 
lent land, he, starting as a baby, never rightly 
got over his babyhood; he never could shed his 
swaddling clothes or escape from his leading 
strings, which everybody about him, man and 
especially woman, seemed trying to grasp, and 
thus become the real sovereign of England. A 
creative time of king-masters and even king-mak- 
ers it was, who never forgot that if they could 
only make themselves king-makers, they would be 
all the king — and more. 

Five plays, we say, form the group which the 
Shakespearian student has to take into his reckon- 
ing under the title of Henry VI. These five 
fall into two distinct series, the canonical and 



154 SEAEESPEAEE'S LIFE-DBAMA. 

the uncanonical, each being thus measured by the 
authorized canon of the Folio of 1623. For only 
three of these plays, superscribed as the First, Sec- 
ond, and Third Parts of Henry VI, were printed 
by the first editors, Heminge and Condell, not only 
with Shakespeare's consent, but, as we believe, in 
obedience to his directions. The other two plays, 
however, being thus excluded from the Shake- 
spearian canon, may be deemed apocryphal, though 
they are intimately related on a number of points 
with the accepted text just mentioned. In fact, 
these two apocryphal dramas are seen to be, upon a 
little inspection, the early forms or the less mature 
redactions of the two canonical dramas, the Second 
and Third Parts of Henry VI. So the First Part 
of Henry VI stands alone, without any such 
apocryphal back-ground, though it ought to be 
classed with the same on account of its unripeness 
and general inferiority, according to the view of 
some critics. Still this view is not without its 
frowning interrogation mark. 

These two uncanonical plays were first printed 
as separate Quartos in 1594 and 1595 respectively, 
that is, more than twenty years before the death 
of Shakespeare. They give no name of their author 
in the first edition, which comes early in the ca- 
reer of the poet. But a much later edition (1619), 
hence after his death, prints both plays together, 
as "newly corrected and enlarged", and also 
adds ''written by William Shakespeare, Gent." 
Here is an indication at least that the poet's name 



EENEY VI. 155 

on the title-page gave luck to the saleability of a 
printed book. Also the reading popularity of 
these dramas is betokened by the repeated edi- 
tions. 

The names of these two uncanonical plays must 
next be noted, for the sake of our collaborative 
Shakespeare. The title pages of both are quite 
long, being in each case a kind of descriptive 
preface, most of which we shall have to omit. The 
earlier runs thus: ''The First Part of the Con- 
tention betwixt the two famous Houses of York 
and Lancaster," which is followed by a kind of 
Table of Contents. Worthy of notice is the fact 
that this drama here asserts itself to be ''the 
First Part," which seems to indicate that the 
canonical ' ' First Part of Henry VI ' ' already men- 
tioned, had not yet appeared. This title is still 
too cumbrous, so we shall abbreviate it, with 
most commentators, simply calling it "The Con- 
tention." The title-page of the second uncanoni- 
cal drama starts thus: "The True Tragedy of 
Richard Duke of York", to which are appended 
numerous other happenings: all of which may be 
abridged simply into "The True Tragedy", Let 
so much be said in the way of some tedious but 
needful preparation, here cut as short as possible. 
And let it again be noted that the above ' ' Conten- 
tion" corresponds to the "Second Part of Henry 
VI", and the "True Tragedy" to the "Third Part 
of Henry VL" 

At this point opens the long and complicated 



156 SHAKESPE ABE'S LIFE-DBAMA 

interplay, or we may call it a battle waged by 
critics and editors over these two sets of dramas, 
the canonical and the uncanonical. The issue 
turns chiefly upon the assignment of authorship, 
in regard to which three attitudes may be taken: 
(1) both sets of plays are by Shakespeare, a view 
specially championed by the English editor Knight 
and by many of the German critics: thus the 
uncanonical set are merely old and incomplete 
drafts which Shakespeare completed in his canoni- 
cal set; (2) neither set is by Shakespeare in any 
responsible sense, even if he raay have added here 
and there some touches; (3) both sets are partially 
by Shakespeare and partially by other authors 
(Peele, Greene, Nash, Lodge, Marlowe), or prob- 
ably these may be reduced to one (Marlowe). 
Here then dawns the very large though misty 
realm of collaboration in Shakespearian exegesis, 
with its thousandfold conjectures shooting out 
every whitherward. The chief difficulty of this 
realm is that it is almost entirely subjective, with 
little or no anchorage on reality, being sprung 
variously of the critic's own mood, taste, temper,, 
talent. Quite resultless the sport seems except as 
a curious literary amusement; it keeps up suc- 
cessive shakings of the brain's kaleidoscope, and 
thus makes new combinations of colors through 
the shifting bits of fantasticalities. Such is one 
of the modern Shakespearian diversions, doubtless 
never intended by the poet. 

Still there is in this field one objective, well 



HENBY VI. 157 

documented fact, which must be fully validated : 
each set of plays can be shown mutually interrcr 
lated by actual mathematics. For instance, T?ie 
Second Part of Henry VI has some 520 lines 
which are also found in The Contention; thus they 
are joined together into a common organism. In 
like manner The Third Part of Henry VI and 
The True Tragedy are interlinked in about 1010 
lines, which are just the same in both plays. Thus 
each set of the two plays, the canonical and the un- 
canonical, intertwine in their dramatic bodies, and 
are found already wrought together, or collabo- 
rated. Moreover each canonical play shows many 
altered lines, that is, lines which are made up of 
words belonging in part to both the old and the 
new pieces. Thus the intergrown twins seem to 
be gradually growing apart in some of their "mem- 
bers. These altered or hybrid lines run to more 
than 800 for each set. Finally each new or canoni- 
cal drama has its own separate complement of 
altogether new lines, of which there is no trace 
in the corresponding uncanonical drama. That is, 
the canonical Second Part of Henry VI has 1715 
entirely new lines, and the canonical Third Part 
of Henry VI has 1021 entirely new lines. 

So this double set of dramas may be compared 
to the Siamese twins, whose organism shows three 
stages moving from unity to separation : first, they 
are in one portion completely united; secondly, 
in another portion they become partly separated 
and partly united; then in a third portion they 



158 SHAKESPE ABE'S LIFE-DEAMA 

branch off completely separated. Yet all these 
stages or portions form the one totality called 
Henry VI. 

Now in this entire work of Henry VI, we find 
two all-dominating collaborators, Shakespeare and 
Marlowe, and the whole reveals a picture of their 
collaboration. Both these poets are of the same 
age, having been born the same year (1564) ; yet 
Marlowe has matured far more rapidly than 
Shakespeare, and thus becomes for a while the 
latter 's guide and exemplar who determines him, 
at first quite absorbing him, till he learns and fully 
assimilates the lesson and indeed the genius of his 
teacher. Then he sets up for himself and composes 
his own independent drama. For, as I read Shake- 
speare, he never fails in self-assertion at the right 
psychical moment; so he coalesces and collaborates 
with the greatest dramatic genius of the time, till 
he quite appropriates Marlowe's distinctive gift, 
and indeed Marlowe himself. 

Very researchful and erudite has been the quest 
for the authorship of these five plays, furnishing 
infinite occupation to the learned critic and the 
University Professor, who have remorselessly dug 
up for illustration not only the bones but the 
very dust of the long-dead scribbling nobodies 
of Elizabethan Literature from their underground 
mausoleum. It is on the whole the most remark- 
able feat of its kind in all Shakespearology, and, 
if we may judge by recent elaborate English 
editions of the poet, this work of excavation is 



EENBY VI. 159 

still going on more intently than ever. But the 
hard-hunted foxy author, be he other than Shake- 
peare himself, seems to turn misty, always es- 
caping overhead out of reach, and being able to 
elude the search and the research and re-research 
up to date, as far as the ordinary reader can 
make out from the enormous piles of erudition, 
which we shall now simply take the time to skip. 
Accordingly let us at once pass to the more open 
and significant question : What led the young poet 
Shakespeare to hit upon the age and character 
of Henry VI as the preluding theme of his dra- 
matic career? England had just done a great 
historic deed in the defeat of the Armada, and 
knew it well; hence she was eager to behold her 
OM^n past history, which told her how she had 
grandly got to be what she then was. The Tudor 
age and spirit were a direct evolution out of 
the Wars of the Roses; hence that Elizabethan 
audience wished to behold itself in the mirror of 
its own historic self-realisation. Then the era 
of Henry VI was probably England's most forma- 
tive, protoplasmic time; her whole institutional 
world as unfolded by the Middle Ages was flung 
into the seething cauldron of Civil War for quite 
half a century, in order to be first disintegrated 
and thereafter to be reconstructed into the new 
order which was just culminating in Queen Eliza- 
beth's epoch. The English drama had already 
made itself the vehicle of showing this grand 
national transformation. The so-called History 



160 SHAKE8PE ABE'S LIFE-DBAMA 

Chronicle, antecedent to Shakespeare, had evolved 
into his Henry VI, which from this viewpoint 
may be deemed a transitional drama, bridging 
the old species over into the new, the latter be- 
ing Shakespeare's own later Histories, as they 
are duly titled in the First Folio. 

Thus the poet has seized the national spirit 
of his time and represented it to itself in its own 
native form, which is that of his English historical 
dramas. And here another result of such occu- 
pation must not be omitted from the record of 
his education. Through this early discipline of 
history, Shakespeare gets to know and to realize 
in himself the basic, most original institution of 
England, namely her political system; such is 
the prime training which makes him supremely 
the institutional poet of all the centuries, Henry 
VI was his great preparatory school of institu- 
tions, which he saw and portrayed going through 
their most fiery trial, and finally coming out re- 
generated and purified, yet ready for another 
testing evolution, or even revolution after the 
Tudors, which of course he did not live to witness. 
The English State, genetic source of the American 
Constitution also, has become the chief model of 
the new European Polities, and the nearest ap- 
proach as yet to a World-State. Of this universally 
creative Institution, which is the most original so- 
cial product of the Anglo-Saxon folk, Shakespeare 
is the poetic re-creator and earth-circling propa- 
gator. Still we are not to forget that all those 



EENEY VI. 161 

historical plays taken together constitute but one 
portion of the total Shakespearian Pan-drama. 

Shakespeare himself must have felt a strong per- 
sonal attraction for the subject of Henry VI, since 
he experienced at this time the like spiritual con- 
dition, for he was passing through the break from 
his simple Stratford country-life into the new com- 
plex London city-life, where he stood in the pal- 
pitating nerve-center of the time's great national 
convulsion and transformation. He wrote him- 
self out into his drama, his experience dictated his 
theme for his own self-expression. And when 
looking back upon his completed Pan-dramatic 
achievement, the editors of the First Folio, doubt- 
less representing Shakespeare himself, must have 
regarded Henry VI with its Three Parts as con- 
stituting an integral member of the poet's total 
poetic organism, as indeed its primal embryonic 
protoplasm, out of which his whole life and work 
were to be shaped and upbuilt. For all the ele- 
ments of it were then cotemporaneously proto- 
plasmic — England, the English drama, the English 
dramatist. All three, we may say, collaborated in- 
stinctively, and hence more deeply than if by any 
conscious purpose, to lay the foundation of that 
poetic world-structure here named the Shake- 
spearian Pan-drama. 

There is another suggestion which may be here 
pointed out to the student in advance: it is the 
strain of prophecy which so often breaks up to 
the surface in the present Trilogy. This pre- 



162 SHAKESPE ABE'S LIFE-DBAMA 

saging vein may be regarded not merely as a 
play-making device, but as the inward urge of the 
poet's own nature, which drives him to an outlook- 
ing forecast of what is to become hereafter both in 
the time and in himself. He feels his day to be 
at the dawn of some great futurity, and his genius 
is full of prescience which utters itself in these 
foretelling characters. Thus he gives us repeated 
glimpses into his own prophetic soul, as he glances 
out upon his coming career. 

Nor are we to forget that there is an under- 
current of the age's deepest tendency running 
through this whole Trilogy, which often touches 
the conflict of the two worlds, the old Latin and 
the rising Anglo-Saxon, between which the strife 
is specially marked in the representatives of 
Church and State, whose two authorities here di- 
rectly clash. But in Elizabeth's time, Spain in- 
stead of France had become the far stronger, 
richer, and more intense Latin protagonist both 
secular and religious. Whereof in this Trilogy 
we may catch some distant echoes. 

I. The First Part of Henry VI. This play 
has a bad name among commentators who stress 
its manifold shortcomings. And it certainly pos- 
sesses little inner unity, being rather a succession 
of separate dramatic pictures strown along many 
years than one concentrated action. Still it has 
a single leading theme : England 's loss of France 
through English weakness, folly, and dissension. 
Hence an ill-omened theme to Englishmen still 



FIBST PABT OF HENBT VI. 163 

in Elizabeth's time, though more than a century- 
after the event. 

But just on account of this discursive treat- 
ment and its lack of organisation it connects with 
the antecedent Chronicle History, as it was called, 
and also suggests the unripe and unpractised be- 
ginner, young Shakespeare. So it has its bio- 
graphic position and value. Still it may have 
been written after the Second Part of Henry VI, 
for the purpose of joining in one loose stretch of 
events the latter chronologically with Henry V, 
and thus of overarching the whole reign of Henry 
VI in one dramatic Trilogy. But its scattered in- 
organic character remains, and leads us to con- 
sider it on the whole as the poet's most protoplas- 
mic play. 

Moreover the first six lines look back to the 
preceding Lancastrian drama of Henry V, and in- 
terrelate it with the forthcoming Trilogy. They 
are also written in a pompous high-flown style 
which recalls Marlowe: 

Hung be the heavens with black, yield day 

to night ! 
Comets, importing change of times and states 
Brandish your crystal tresses in the sky. 
And with them scourge the bad revolting stars 
That have consented unto Henry's death — 
King Henry the Fifth, too famous to live long! 

Here we feel young Shakespeare collaborating spir- 



164 SHAKESPE ABE'S LIFE-DBAMA 

itually with Marlowe, if not literally, for we can 
hear in these lines Tamburlaine 's grandiose oro- 
tundity of expression. As they are printed in the 
First Folio, the poet must be taken to acknowledge 
them as his own writing, even if dictated by Mar- 
lowe's spirit. To be sure, Coleridge, with bad 
judgment and worse temper, has denied and even 
maligned any Shakespearian participation in this 
passage, chiefly on metrical grounds. But Cole- 
ridge hardly conceived the poet's Life-drama in its 
evolution. 

The present play has also its suggestions in re- 
gard to Shakespeare's most distinctive gift, that of 
character-drawing. We may watch him here in 
his early grapple with souls manifesting themselves 
in their outer actions. He starts now to creat- 
ing, or rather re-creating people and making them 
live and move for the theatre's onlooker. Herein 
he is still more or less embryonic and tenta- 
tive. He takes essences or ideas, putting them 
into body and making them act humanly. For 
instance, at the start he seizes two opposite prin- 
ciples representing the deepest conflict of the time, 
namely that of State and Church, or of England 
and Rome, and voices these principles and their 
strife in two strong colliding personalities, Glos- 
ter the State 's regent and Winchester the Church 's 
prelate. Their outlines are large, irregular, rough- 
hewn, but smiting; the later Shakespearian subtle- 
ties of characterisation have not yet risen to the 
surface. Indeed the time is coarse-grained, up- 



FIBST PAST OF HENBY VI. 165 

roarious and bellicose, given to quick, hard-fisted 
blows, and to hot revenges. 

Here we are brought to face the most furiously 
unanimous assault upon this play because of 
the poet's character of the Pucelle, or the Maid 
of Orleans. Shakespeare's own character has 
often been included in this chorus of damnation, 
and he may not be at every point blame-proof. 
But no critic within our knowledge has fully 
grasped the first matter here to be emphasized, 
which is this : there are two Joan Dares in the play 
— two characters of the one Maid not only diverse 
but contradictory. When the French speak of 
her, she is treated with all sympathy, her divine 
mission is recognized ; she has beheld in vision the 
true need of her country, which she proceeds 
to liberate through her miraculous power. But 
the Englishmen scout her claims, defame her 
honor, make her deny her own father ; her cunning 
is deemed by them of the devil, and finally they 
burn her for a witch. Such are the two opposite 
views of her, which really spring from the two 
opposing nations ; one of these her work is to save 
by the defeat and expulsion of the other. Hence 
we behold two antagonistic, mutually repellent 
Joan Dares, as if she may have had a double, 
self-combative personality (which by the way is 
one construction of her character). 

Still this contradiction in the portraiture of Joan 
Dare is the defect, the grand disharmony in the 
drama. Such a result may spring from the im- 



166 SHAKESPE ABE'S LIFE-DBAMA. 

maturity of the poet, who, seeking to give impar- 
tially both sides, the French and the English, al- 
lows their shrilling dissonance to remain in the 
heroine's character. Or here we may find the 
cleavage of a double collaboration, the unfavorable 
view of the woman being set forth by Marlowe, 
who has shown himself elsewhere a misogynist, in 
contrast to Shakespeare's pervasive woman-love. 

Time has, however, more and more vindicated 
the French view of France's illustrious heroine, 
in spite of the ribaldry and obscenity of one 
of her greatest writers. It is Voltaire, who in 
his Pucelle, has more than magnified the old-Eng- 
lish foul conception of her deed and character, 
as represented in the bad half of Shakespeare's 
picture. But to-day's France has again taken up 
Joan Dare in deepest affection, and idealized 
her in art and poetry as her country's heroic 
exemplar during the recent world-war with Ger- 
many. And we read that the Church has resolved 
to confer at Rome upon the French Maid the 
somewhat belated rite of canonization, which is 
indeed taking place while we write this sentence. 
St. Denys seems thus to be supplanted by a woman- 
saint in the revived worshipful soul of France, 
hitherto often not so very worshipful. 

Another strong genetic scene in this play is that 
which is enacted in the Temple Garden where 
Richard Plantagenet plucks a white rose and 
Somerset a red rose in mutual opposition. Thus 
the two roses become the symbols of the two col- 



SECOND PABT OF HENBT VI. 167 

liding Houses of York and Lancaster, whose strife 
carries us into the next play pertaining to Henry 
VI. On account of its superior style and handling, 
we may note an advance of Marlowe 's pupil, though 
collaborating spiritually and doubtless literally 
with the master. 

II. The Second Part of Henry VI. This is 
in our opinion decidedly the best play of the 
Trilogy, the largest in conception, though its or- 
ganism still remains more or less in the protoplas- 
mic stage of the poet. We can see him chalk- 
ing great outlines of characterisation, especially in 
the case of Queen Margaret and of Henry the 
King, both of whom throw their morning gleams 
upon a number of his future dramatic creations. 
Most significant, too, is the upburst of the folk's 
under-world, which, in one shape or other, streams 
through the whole argument from the first act 
to the last: greatest example of which is the 
outbreak of the proletariat under Jack Cade, The 
strife which England directed against another 
neighboring and cognate people, is now turned 
around into herself ; her external assault on France 
becomes internal with a national Nemesis, En- 
glish dissension, which weakened the armies 
abroad, drives savagely at the home-land, and the 
result is Civil War famed as that of the Roses. 
Kings and Nobles, in the furious struggle for the 
supreme power of the State, slaughter one another 
in the very gluttony of mutual retribution. 

Dominating and centering the drama is a woman. 



168 SHAKESPE ABE'S LIFE-DBAMA 

Queen Margaret, the strong-willed married to the 
weak-willed King Henry VI, whose sovereignty it 
is her supreme ambition to seize and wield abso- 
lutely. She comes from France and is thus the 
second French woman (the other being Joan Dare) 
who shows herself able to rise up a destructive 
fate suspended over England. The poet through 
her enemy York has not failed to suggest her na- 
tional origin and character. 

She-wolf of France, but worse than wolves 
of France, 

Whose tongue more poisons than the ad- 
der's tooth! 

Thus is indicated the transition from the pre- 
ceding First Part to the present Second Part 
of Henry VI: the hostility of France, represented 
by a woman, has crossed the channel and has 
become seated on the very throne of England — 
a French Fury now wearing the English crown. 
The character of this French-born English queen 
is drawn in massive, strong, but somewhat ex- 
aggerated features, doubtless after the Marlowese 
model. She is a man-woman — sexed as a beauti- 
ful, artful, vain female, yet unsexed as a will-pow- 
erful, ambitious, blood-thirsty male. The poet 
caught a hint of her double nature from the old 
chronicle of Hall, which he read and reproduced: 
Queen Margaret, it reports, "excelled all others 
in beauty and favor, as well as in wit and policy," 
(feminine excellences), but also ''she was in stem- 



SECOND PABT OF HENBT VI. 169 

ach (daring) and courage more like a man than 
a woman." The same dualistic character is given 
her in the play from various mouths, for instance 

And yet be seen to bear a woman's face! 
Women are soft, mild, pitiful, and flexible, 
Thou stern, obdurate, flinty, rough, remorseless! 

And fitting into this context may be cited the best 
known line of the play, since it was slightly altered 
and hurled by the bitter-souled Robert Greene 
against Shakespeare himself: 

tiger's heart wrapp'd in a woman's hide! 

the word woman's being changed to player's by 
Greene, as is instanced on a preceding page. 

Here we see doubtless the earliest example of the 
poet assigning the dominant place in his drama to 
the woman. Soon hereafter he will repeat this fe- 
male enthronement over the male in a number of 
comedies, as we may note in the case of Portia, of 
Rosalind, of Helena. Already we have under- 
scored the fact that such a supremacy of the 
woman lay deep and long in his own experience, 
for he saw her ever regnant in his own home dur- 
ing his entire youth. And when he passed outside 
the Family to London, to the center of the State, 
what did he witness? Queen Elizabeth's strong, 
self-assertive masculinity over the greatest men of 
her court. Indeed one often thinks in reading 
this play, that Elizabeth must have more than 
once furnished strokes for Margaret's picture — 



170 SHAKESPE ABE'S LIFE-DBAMA 

the petty female vanities of her as well as her 
greatnesses, with even that vagrant hint of her 
secret love-life. And Margaret's extreme jealousy 
and cruelty toward any queenly rival brings to 
mind Elizabeth's dealing with Mary Queen of 
Scots, when we hear Margaret explode : 

Not all these lords do vex me half so much 
As that proud dame, the Lord Protector 's wife : 

who also aspires to be England's Queen and claims 
the throne, according to the right of inheritance. 
And she too finally like Mary is entrapped to her 
fate. So we may catch a faint reflection of the 
impression produced upon the sensitive poet by 
the execution of the Scottish Queen Mary, which 
took place in 1587, probably during the composi- 
tion of this drama. 

But Margaret with all her strength, as por- 
trayed by Shakespeare, is a deeply destructive, 
vengeful, diabolic character, who at last turns to 
the very picture and voice of Nemesis (see her and 
hear her last in Richard III). Thus our young 
poet starts his career by dramatizing the infernal 
female — at this point I would stress the collabo- 
rative influence of the decided woman-hater Kit 
Marlowe. But Shakespeare's own life-experience 
at Stratford had already furnished some fertile 
soil for the growth of such a poisonous, even if 
colossal upas-tree. Yet I would hold that Mar- 
lowe's Satanic Titanism was now the main power 
at work upon the still boyishly impressionable 



SECOND PABT OF HENBY VI. 171 

poet, who was yet at school to the mighty but 
sinister master. And the gigantic lesson of the 
negative woman remained with him to the end 
of his days, for he repeated Margaret, undoubtedly 
with significant variations, in Lady Macbeth many 
years later during his Middle Period, and we feel 
him reproducing demonic Margaret again in King 
Cymbeline's Queen, whose royal female deviltry is 
exquisitely brought out in one of his latest plays 
(Cymbeline). 

And now we come to her grand contrast, her 
own crowned husband with his elaborately limned 
character, deeply moralized yet unwilled through 
his very morality and piety. More of the woman 
is his than of the man, and it is a woman, his own 
wife and queen, who flings at him reproachfully 
his unsexed nature : 

Fie ! womanish man ! canst thou not curse 
thine enemies? 

No other line tells in one mad splash of words 
so much about him and about her, and yet 
it occurs only in "The Contention", having 
been somehow dropped out of its true place and 
weakened in the revised Second Part of Henry 
YI (see W. A. Wright's edition of ''The Conten- 
tion", Act III, Scene II, line 145 for the verse 
in its most effective form and thrust, being there 
directed at the King and not at her lover Suffolk, 
for whom it has little point). On the other hand, 
Margaret, obsessed by the love of regal power, 



172 SBAEESPEABE'S LIFE-DBAMA. 

might commune with herself now in the words of 
her later self, Lady Macbeth : 

Come you spirits 
That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here, 
And fill me from the crown to the toe, top-ful 

Of direst cruelty! 

Come to my woman's breasts. 
And take my milk for gall, you murdering 
ministers. 

But the physical and the intellectual antithesis 
between King and Queen is not their deepest, but 
the moral ; their ultimate differentiation lies in 
their conscience. The supreme lack of it makes 
the woman masculine, the supreme excess of it 
makes the man feminine; and now the woman- 
soul unconscienced is wedded to the man-soul con- 
scienced. Later in Richard III the poet will sum- 
mon before us a King unconscienced as the male 
facsimile to Margaret, the Queen, who will tell 
him back his own, both being products of this vam- 
pyre-bearing age. Still later in Hamlet we shall 
behold another conscienced Henry VI, whose will 
is unmanned through conscience, and who knows 
his own frailty well, confessing it with bitter self- 
reproach in the calmly terrible line (pivotal not 
only for Hamlet but for Shakespeare himself) : 

Thus conscience does make cowards of us all. 

That is, it makes a coward of me specially, jtist 
this Hamlet. (I am fully aware that in this well- 



SECOND PABT OF EENET VI. 173 

worn passage the meaning Ox the word conscience 
has been utterly perverted and eviscerated by 
forcing it to signify thought or reflection — a deed 
of murder done to Hamlet himself worse than that 
done to his father. Some nemesis lowers for the 
perpetrators of this dark deed later on, when we 
come to the Hamlet play). 

Several times in the present drama the word 
conscience is used by King Henry VI, and no 
other character utters it except him. It is indeed 
his personal word, and moreover it is not found 
in the previous play of The First Part of Henry 
Yl, whose action takes place chiefly during the 
nurseling years of the boy-king, who nevertheless 
gives a few foretokens of his prevailing bent. But 
conscience with its synonyms becomes now his 
soul's own breviary, enthroning the moral judg- 
ment within the man, and asserting itself as the 
absolute inner umpire of our outer actions, which 
may thus by it get quite vetoed and generally 
lamed. So our poet-psychologist has repeatedly 
construed the reaction of conscience upon the will, 
whereof Henry VI is only the preluding example. 
Hence this King's speeches are replete with good 
moral maxims, valid in their due limits, but in 
their excess hamstringing all activity. This may be 
illustrated by a famous citation from Henry's 
moralizing anthology: 

What stronger breastplate than a heart untainted? 
Thrice is he armed that hath his quarrel just; 



174 SHAKESPE ABE'S LIFE-DBAMA. 

And he but naked, though loek'd up in steel, 
Whose conscience with injustice is corrupted. 

Who does not feel uplifted by these pithy moral 
apothegms? And yet the good king will find 
out, and the play will show him finding out, that 
his ''heart untainted" needs a "stronger breast- 
plate" than merely itself in order to exist in this 
world, that his own "just quarrel" even with its 
triple armor, did not preserve him from becoming 
tragic in life's conflict. 

Thus we behold the young dramatist opening 
his career in a desperate wrestle with conscience 
and its moral challenge. He must already have 
had some personal knowledge of this inner regnant 
authority, the individual's own self-crowned king- 
ship, for it is Shakespeare's way, as already indi- 
cated, to distil his most intimate experience into his 
dramatic characters. Morover the time was get- 
ting to have its own alert and aggressive con- 
science, being roused to a fresh intense activity 
through the Reformation, and in England es- 
pecially through the rising Puritanism, that new 
English Reformation of the Reformation. Shake- 
speare, the supremely responsive chronicler of his 
age, could not help feeling and sharing this 
deepest palpitation of the time's heart. Most com- 
mentators say he was hostile to Puritanism, but I 
do not so construe his word and deed ; on the con- 
trary he partook, with sympathy but without ex- 
cess, of this unique soul-searching manifestation 



SECOND PABT OF HENBT VI. 175 

of the nation's inner evolution. An undertow of 
conscience we shall find streaming and straining 
through his entire Life-drama from this earliest 
work till his last. 

But the present play is chiefly remembered as the 
one in which Jack Cade, the reformer and the 
revolutionist, starts up as the opponent of King 
and Nobles, and it is his strong, craggy-featured 
but humorous portrait here drawn by Shakespeare 
which is usually cited as proof of the poet's aris- 
tocratic or anti-democratic bias. This year (1920) 
Cade rouses new interest as the leader of the so- 
called proletariat, which has risen in rebellion 
against individual ownership of property as well 
as against the titled classes, and also shows it- 
self hostile to all education, for one of Cade's 
condemned malefactors has been guilty of "erect- 
ing a grammar-school" (perchance at Stratford) 
and of having caused ''printing to be used," and 
"thou hast built a paper mill." Such is the 
new equality of ignorance proclaimed by Cade, 
who also decrees: "And henceforward all things 
shall be in common. ' ' So that old-new communism 
of goods and wives is here touched up by Shakes- 
peare, undoubtedly with a little teeheeing laugh 
all to himself. 

Accordingly it turns out that this Second Part 
of Henry VI is Shakespeare's chief drama of 
popular discontent, though he introduces the same 
theme elsewhere. Social unrest, as we call it in 
these days, underlies the whole drama, and often 



176 SHAK'ESFEABE'S LIFE-DBAMA 

seethes up to the surface in various uncanny- 
outbreaks. Most important of all, the Commons 
rise in revolt against the government on account 
of the murder of "the good Duke Humphrey," 
being led by the king-maker Warwick, whose am- 
bition has taken advantage of a situation which he 
thus describes: 

The Commons, like an angry hive of bees, 
That want their leader, scatter up and down, 
And care not who they sting in his revenge. 

Such is the folk's "spleenful mutiny", which 
the artful king-maker puts to the fore against 
the unmanned King and the unwomaned Queen, 
whose weak discordant rule he with the Commons 
will supplant, usurping the regal power which un- 
derlies the throne. 

But there are other darker, more hidden opera- 
tions which spring from the infernal underworld 
of the time. An uncanny thread of forbidden 
magic is spun by "Margery Jourdan the cunning 
witch", with the aid of "Roger Bolingbroke the 
conjurer," who have promised to call up "a spirit 
raised from depth of underground". Caught in 
their maleficent toils is sent to banishment the 
Duchess Eleanor, wife of good Duke Humphrey, 
who also gets smirched in their pitch. Then we 
see the servant Peter turning informer and secretly 
betraying his master, who in an unguarded moment 
had said, "that the king was an usurper", the 
rightful heir being the Duke of York. Also a re- 



SECOND PABT OF HENBY VI. I77 

ligious imposter Simpcox creeps forth out of his 
dark lair to daylight, shouting "a miracle! a 
miracle!" But being detected and whipped he 
takes to his heels mid the scoff's of the ungodly. 
Hired assassins waylay and murder ''the good 
Duke Humphrey" for a price. Then in just retri- 
bution, pirates at sea slay the murderer and 
adulterer Suffolk. The bad Cardinal Beaufort 
dies, beholding visions of retribution like those of 
Macbeth. 

Thus no less than six hellish upbursts from the 
infernal regions now aflame everywhere under- 
neath England we may count in the course of this 
play, constituting its chief peculiarity among the 
works of Shakespeare. Never again to the same 
excessive amount will he employ such dramatic 
brimstone, which smells here more of master Mar- 
lowe than of pupil Shakespeare. Still this lower 
world of the folk finds its due counterpart in the 
upper world of royalty and nobility, who are mak- 
ing a Pandemonium of mutual carnage out of 
Britain, and like fiends broken loose from Satan's 
Netherdom are hugely charactered with blood- 
guilt and blood-revenge. 

But the greatest, the most significant, yea the 
most prophetic of all these upheavals is that of 
"John Cade of Ashford, a headstrong Kentish- 
man", the bricklayer's son, whose words have to- 
day a familiar note echoing around the whole 
globe. We may now hear shouted from all lands, 
not merely from that one little speck of English 



178 SHAKESPE ABE'S LIFE-DBAMA. 

soil named Blackheath, a language not unlike that 
which Cade addresses to his class called by him 
the Commons, at present known as the Proletariat, 
Cade universalized we read and think to-day, and 
as such he is more ominous, aye more prophetic 
than ever before. And so we presentimentally 
hang over his broken utterances in this play, one 
of which, rather ragged in style but plain enough 
in its general intent, we may here set down : 

And you, that love the Commons, follow me. 
Now show yourselves men; 'tis for liberty. 
We will not leave one lord, one gentleman; 
Spare none but such as go in clouted shoon, 
For they are thrifty honest men, and such 
As would, but that they dare not, take our parts. 

Such is Shakespeare's Cade whom many would 
now call a Bolshevist. From this earliest work of 
the poet let us for a moment turn to his last play. 
The Tempest, in which he again gives us a glimpse 
of an ideal idle community of a workless folk, 
whose one extreme is reached in the reveling 
speech of liberty-loving drunken Caliban: "Free- 
dom, heyday, heyday, freedom, freedom, heyday 
freedom!" Such may be conceived the outcome 
of Jack Cade 's popular decree : ' ' the three-hooped 
pot shall have ten hoops, and I will make it 
felony to drink small beer." 

III. The Third Part of Henry the Sixth. Here 
is a good deal of letting-down at a number of 



TEIBD PABT OF EENBY VI. I79 

points; strikingly the present drama shrivels, be- 
ing much inferior to the preceding one in breadth 
and grandeur of conception as well as in wealth 
of characters, even if it may claim a closer though 
narrower unity of action. Chiefly it keeps up the 
bloody seesaw of Nemesis between the two Roses, 
white and red. Thus it continues and repeats 
what has been already enacted to a sufficiency. 
Battle succeeds battle, murder requites murder, 
till at last the Lancastrians, represented by the 
king and his son, are swept away in death, and 
the Trilogy ends with the triumph of the Yorkists, 
who, however, cannot halt the rapid rush of their 
own self-undoing. 

In this drama is no upburst from the dark, 
seething, nether depths of the folk-soul, which 
gives such a new prophetic interest to the preced- 
ing play. The scenic movement is quite confined 
to the upper classes, the noble and the royal com- 
batants, who slash each other frantically out of 
life. Even the king-maker Warwick is now un- 
kinged by death; he must be eliminated, if king- 
ship is to survive in England. The will-paralytic 
Henry VI shows himself still unmanned through 
his conscience, to whose behest he is ready to sur- 
render even his crown, exclaiming: "1 know not 
what to say, my title's weak," and he actually 
gives up his son's future right of succession to 
the throne. An echo of his inner voice may be 
heard in the words of Exeter: "My conscience 
tells me he [York] is lawful king." Whereupon 



180 SHAKESPE ABE'S LIFE-DBAMA. 

the conscienceless but motherly Margaret breaks 
out in will-assertive energy: 

I here divorce myself 
Both from thy table, Henry, and thy bed, 
Until that act of parliament be repeal'd, 
Whereby my son is disinherited. 

But even the slight compromise in favor of Henry 
is torn to pieces by the maddened sons of York, 
who insist upon their father 's immediate possession 
of kingship, which is his right. And so the mutual 
blood-letting again starts the time 's mortal surgery. 
But the main interest of the present drama 
centers in the fierce germination and crimson flow- 
ering of the character of Richard, son of York, who 
is hereafter to be staged by Shakespeare peren- 
nially as King Richard III. Already in the pre- 
vious play we have caught a forecast of his inborn 
fighting nature when he savagely roars : ' ' And if 
words will not, then our weapons shall." Also 
that peculiar demoniacal stress upon his bodily 
malformation as mirroring his inner crooked soul 
we begin to hear in Clifford's reproach: 

Hence, heap of wrath, foul indigested lump: 
As crooked in thy manners as thy shape. 

But in the present play we soon are given an out- 
look upon the future of the man, his supreme goal 
and his remorseless means for attaining it — the 
Kingship. So we scan carefully this early self- 
revelation of him in which lurks not only what he 



TRIED PAST OF HENBY VI. 181 

is but what he is to be (Henry VI, Part III, 
A. I. Sc. 2) : 

Your oath, my lord, is vain and frivolous — 
Therefore, to arms! And, father, do but think 
How sweet a thing it is to wear a crown 
Within whose circuit is Elysium, 
And all that poets feign of bliss and joy. 
Why do we linger thus? I cannot rest 
Until the white rose that I v/ear be dyed 
Even in the lukewarm blood of Henry's 
heart. 

Perjury, war, murder he will use in order "to wear 
a crown", and will destroy on his way thereto 
not only the hostile red rose but also his own white 
rose to its last surviving member, who is just 
himself. 

In unfolding the character of Richard we al- 
ways feel the influence, if not the hand, of the 
poet's master, Marlowe, whose Tamburlane tells 
on the author himself: 

The thirst of reign and sweetness of a crown 
Moved me to manage arms against thy state — 
That perfect bliss and sole felicity, 
The sweet fruition of an earthly crown. 

Thus Tamburlane gives his supreme motive: the 
ambition for sovereign power. To the same pur- 
port we may now observe Shakespeare letting 
Richard soliloquize his deepest desire: 



182 SEAKESPEABE'S LIFE-DEAMA 

I'll make my heaven to dream upon the crown; 
And, whiles I live, to account this world but hell, 
Until my mis-shap 'd trunk, that bears this head, 
Be round impaled with a glorious crown. 

Evidently Marlowe's Tamburlane and Shake- 
speare's Richard III are endowed with the same 
ultimate passion: the resolve to kingly rule, with- 
out regard to any scruple of love, pity, or right. 
Yet Richard has a personal trait distinct from Tam- 
burlane: his hideous physical deformity which 
envenoms his diabolic scoffing at his own body, 
on whose shape corrupt nature "in my mother's 
womb ' ' wreaked her spite : 

To shrink mine arm up like a wither 'd shrub; 
To make an envious mountain on my back, 
Where sits deformity to mock my body. 
To shape my legs of an unequal size, 
To disproportion me in every part 
Like to a chaos — 

Thus he champions his own monstrosity with a 
kind of gloating hyberbole. But this unique and 
indeed capital trait of self-cynicism in Richard 
is not found in Tamburlane, who rather glori- 
fies or even defies his own heroic organism: 

Of stature tall and straightly fashioned, 
Like his desire lift upward and divine, 
So large of limbs, his joints so strongly knit 
Such breadth of shoulders as might mainly bear 
Old Atlas' burden. (Tamburlane, Part First, 
Act 11. Sc. 1) 



THIED PART OF HENEY VI. 183 

Whence may the incipient and still collaborating 
poet have caught his first original glimpse of this 
rarest, most individual stroke of Richard's soul- 
picture? Again we shall find it dreamily sug- 
gested, though massively and rudely, by the ever- 
prolific Marlowe in his drama of Faustus, of which 
the fiend Mephistopheles, ''servant of Lucifer" is 
a leading character, endowed both with inner devil- 
try and corresponding outer deformity. Indeed 
the demon's first appearance there was so horrible 
that even Faustus could not endure his hideous 
look, and so commands him to go back and dis- 
guise his awful ugliness (Marlow's Faustus Scene 
3.): 

I charge thee to return and change thy shape ! 
Thou art too ugly to attend on me. 
Go and return an old Franciscan friar, 
That holy shape becomes a devil best. 

Of course, Shakespeare eliminates this savage sa- 
tire against the Church, which may be indicative 
of a certain sympathy with it, and completely hu- 
manizes Mephistopheles in Eichard, who, however, 
still keeps and amplifies and indeed intensifies the 
fiend's caustic, self -cynical word-venom. 

Somewhere about 1589, it has been reasonably 
conjectured, the Faustus of Marlowe was staged, 
having been composed not long before. Thus it 
falls within the time of the Shakespeare-Marlowe 
collaborative partnership. Moreover the Faust 
legend had been brought to England from Ger- 



184 SHAKESPEARE'S LIFE-DBAMA 

many, first possibly by strolling actors who then 
often wandered overseas. But its chief traceable 
source was the English version of Johann Spiess' 
Faust-book translated from the German and 
printed at London in 1588, whence it was popu- 
larized in tale, drama, and ballad. Thus Shake- 
speare must have heard and read the Faust-legend 
in his early formative time, and it became a part of 
his protoplasmic literary material, whereof traces 
may often be spied by the watchful reader. Direct 
allusions to ''Faustus" and to " Mephostophilus " 
bubble up twice in Merry Wives of Windsor, not 
to speak of other unnamed hints. But in Henry IV 
Falstaff is reported to have sold his soul to the 
devil "for a cup of Madeira and a cold capon's 
leg" — a humorous echo of the central fact of the 
Faust legend. 

But the main point here to be emphasized is that 
the poet-apprentice now in his primal workshop 
smelts together two huge sons of thunder born of 
his master Marlowe, Tamburlane and Mephosto- 
philus, both loftily reverberant of name like their 
deed, into one colossal and enduring personality, 
Richard III. So we construe our new Promethean 
man-former Shakespeare, as we watch him mightily 
laboring and wrestling with his refractory stuff 
and often repeating his giant strokes in this Third 
Part of Henry VI. We may also observe that the 
poet is now winning his supreme lesson, having 
compounded into one eternal character two of his 
master's grandiose but unfulfilled conceptions, 



THIBD PART OF HENEY VI. 185 

which he has thus absorbed and transcended. For 
Jllarlowe's two figures, though each be as crudely 
colossal as an Egyptian statue, are alive and active 
to-day chiefly in and through Shakespeare's 
Richard III. 

. Here, then, the hapless Trilogy of Henry VI 
sinks to its end, a scattered, ferocious, but also 
feracious jungle of writ, germinating wildly every- 
where, and containing as it were, the embryology 
of the entire coming Shakespearian productivity. 
Hence we have spent so much microscopy upon it, 
not for its own poetic sake indeed, but because it 
exhibits our poet's dramatic school, headed by that 
Titanic but unrealized genius, dominie Kit Mar- 
lowe, wonderfully seedful, even if of the seedy. 
Be it noted again that we have omitted all erudite 
pursuit of this Trilogy's multiple authorship, a 
game which seems to lead everywhither into 
nowhere. 

We have, accordingly, reached commencement- 
day of the foregoing Marlowese school, whose star 
pupil, William Shakespeare, now writes under his 
own name his graduation piece, Richard III. This, 
on the one hand, may be pronounced to have the 
most Mephistophelian character in the poet 's entire 
Pan-drama, shot through, as Richard is, with the 
devil's unique self-caricaturing irony. But on the 
other hand, by way of deepest counter-thrust, the 
battle of conscience is taken up and intensified 
from Henry VI, being more emphasized and elabo- 
rated than in any other play of Shakespeare, with 



186 SHAKESPEARE'S LIFE-DBAMA 

the possible exception of Hamlet. The furious 
dualism between Conscience and Devil lurks ulti- 
mate in Richard's soul, is indeed Richard's very 
selfhood, and he knows it ; so he keeps fighting and 
even describing his inner battle, which is yet more 
desperate and tragic than his outer bloody combat. 
Just here lies the immortality of the present drama, 
its deathless lesson and interest for us dual mortals, 
who likewise find in ourselves a more or less vivid 
copy of the same sort of warfare. 

Another thought will obtrude itself: graduate 
Shakespeare cannot help giving some pictured out- 
line of his great teacher, with whose genius and 
character he has lived and labored in deepest com- 
munion, probably for a couple of years or more. 
In master Marlowe himself, I think, he could wit- 
ness the hardest battle between Conscience and the 
Devil ever fought on the arena of a human soul. 
Thus Shakespeare pours into the capacious per- 
sonation of Richard III his own immediate indi- 
vidual experience with his teacher, who was also at 
the time his exemplar, his compelling model. For 
he could see the conjunction and fusion of Mar- 
lowe's two supreme characters, the would-be 
world-conqueror Tamburlane and the would-be 
world-destroyer Mephistopheles, in the man before 
him, who is also known to have had his long and 
tragic struggle with the time 's conscience. And the 
poet felt and ejected out of himself into his work 
his own Titanic mood. 

But before we quit this very embryonic Trilogy 



SICHABD III. 187 

of Henry VI, we may well listen to the corrosive 
words toward its close, in which Gloster, the right 
child and heir of the Wars of the Roses, gives vent 
to the inmost thought of himself, affirming his 
utterly isolated and demonized character as the 
genuine product of the time's militarism: 

Then, since the heavens have shap 'd my body so, 
Let hell make crook 'd my mind to answer it, 
I have no brother, I am like no brother; 
And this word love, which greybeards call divine, 
Be resident in men like one another, 
And not in me: I am myself alone. — 

Such a completely de-socialized individual has 
the long national strife brought forth in its final 
evolution. Richard declares that he can no longer 
associate with his fellow-man, having abjured all 
love : I am myself alone. This colossal conception 
of the destroyer of man's institutional world has 
gotten hold of our young dramatic graduate, who 
proposes to realize it in his new-won art. So let us 
now witness intently his preluding drama, which, 
with all its independence and originality, still bears 
the signal impress of the previous collaborative 
influence of Master Marlowe. 

III. 

Richard III. 

No little difference of opinion among the most 
expert date-hunters concerning the right birth-year 



188 SHAKESPEARE'S LIFE-DBAMA. 

of this Shakespearian play: they vary the time of 
its composition some six or eight years among them- 
selves. But what is for us the most important 
matter, its place in the evolution of our poet 's Life- 
drama can be fixed with reasonable precision: it 
fills its own independent niche just after Henry VI, 
out of whose somewhat nebulous mass it seems 
rapidly to shoot forth a brilliant well-defined star, 
not of the first but of the second or perchance third 
magnitude, in the constellation Shakespeare. 

This, then, is the prime salient characteristic 
which we have to emphasize: the drama of Rich- 
ard III is strikingly and rather suddenly individu- 
alized out of the poet's previous protoplasmic 
material, and as a work it rounds itself out to a 
distinctive wholeness. Still further, its characters 
rise up and begin to shape themselves in clearer 
outlines from that as yet rather unformed but 
form-seeking mass of personages known as the 
Trilogy of Henry VI. But especially one mighty 
Titanic individual greets us at the very start of the 
action, and holds us in his demonic fascination till 
the close, with a spell which has shown itself 
deathless. Richard Crookback still strides with 
devilish limp the stage, and has become acquainted 
with more people to-day than ever before. And 
one other grand personality rises clearly above the 
horizon, separate, independent, the new creator of 
these new personalities: the dramatist Shake- 
speare. He is no longer here in mere collaboration, 
jndistinctively commingled with other dramatists; 



BICHABD III. 189 

he has become himself, he can say with his leading 
character, though in a different spirit, and he does 
say by his creative deed: "I am myself alone." 
But he still carries, even in his independence, the 
fadeless impress of his teacher Marlowe. 

Such is the spirit which can be felt through these 
mightily but often roughly hammered and ham- 
mering verses, as they assert with a grand defiance 
the fresh-born individuality of the poet. That is 
what he has in common with Richard, not being like 
him the murderer, perjurer, devil, except ideally 
for the time being. We may indeed take this play, 
as already said, to be Shakespeare's declaration of 
independence; he proclaims the freedom of his 
genius henceforth without being trammeled from 
elsewhence, and it may be regarded as his first 
completely self-dependent production in the total 
sweep of his Life-drama. 

Still we can trace an outside powerful influence 
interweaving with the very flow of the poet's own 
creative energy. In style the present drama is 
largely Marlowese, at times Marlowesque. We can 
often feel in it the ground-swell of Oceanic Tani- 
hurlane, which began a new era in the history of 
the English stage and also in Shakespeare's evolu- 
tion. The mighty line of Christopher Marlowe (as 
Ben Johson has baptized it forever) is here heard 
again in all its mightiness — and something more. 
Yes, decidedly something more — and what is it? 

Various differences have been pointed out be- 
tween Marlowe and Shakespeare, for there is felt 



190 SHAKESPEARE'S LIFE-DBAMA 

to be some all- compelling antithesis between the 
two grandeurs, though both be endowed supremely 
with the godlikeness of poetic genius. We read 
Marlowe to-day, and certainly with uplift and 
admiration ; still we hunt after him and study him 
chiefly for the sake of his pupil Shakespeare, whose 
hidden filaments of origin reaching far down into 
unconscious deeps we have to dig for, as being not 
the least of our time's cultural tasks. One of these 
differences has been often set forth : Marlowe, very 
unlike Shakespeare herein, has little or no humor, 
and hence little or no relief from the overwhelming 
grandiosity of his expression, whose verbal cataract 
tosses you around and wears you out in trying to 
swim with it, even to listen to its Niagara. Then 
his characters he sculptured as far-off prodigious 
Titans, in a kind of fog-world, not as sunlit 
Olympian Gods, nor as clear-cut mortal heroes, 
with their limited humanity. Then again Marlowe 
did not know the woman-soul, though he has his 
female characters. He never got hold of the real 
woman — and his life, yea his death shows it — 
whereas Shakespeare loved and appreciated the 
woman better than he did the man, for which bent 
he had good experience at home in his boyhood. 
To these well-known and acknowledged short-com- 
ings, I am going to add another which becomes 
of special significance in this our study of Richard 
III, by way of contrast. Here it is : Marlowe has 
little or no Conscience; while in Shakespeare Con- 
science with its ups and downs, with its yes and its 



BICHAED III. 191 

no, with its rewards and its punishments, with its 
pungent criticism of life, winds through his whole 
London Pan-drama from start to finish. Some 
strong thrusts of it we have already found in 
Henry VI, but in our present drama it is an inner, 
deep-flowing ever-lashing undercurrent, or I might 
dare personify it and circumscribe it as an actual 
character, calling it Conscience herself in person, 
who, getting voice in one shape and another, glides 
through the entire action, as it were uttering her 
doom inside and underneath the outer doings of 
Richard, who drives on in his destructive hurricane 
of vengeance to his final catastrophe. 

Here, accordingly, I would align the grand 
transition from head master Marlowe to his gradu- 
ate Shakespeare, or from the unfledged novice and 
learner to the free-winged poet, who now goes into 
business on his own account. An epochal transi- 
tion in this Life-drama of his we think it, passing 
as it does from his early embryonic outpushes to 
his full-born, even if still callow productivity 

But now our turn comes to stress and to ex- 
emplify definitely this persistent ever-driving 
undertow of Conscience which streams through the 
whole drama, and especially through the inner 
subjective nature of Richard, otherwise the out- 
wardly deedful villain, as he calls himself, when 
he says "I am determined to prove a villain." 
Nevertheless, we hear him recognize in one of his 
earliest soliloquies, the existence of these deeper 
internal forces even while gloating with diabolic 



192 SHAKESPEARE'S LIFE-DEAMA. 

irony on his swift triumph over dutiful but weak 
Princess Anne : 

Having God, her Conscience, and these 

bars against me, 
And I no friends to back my suit withal, 
But the plain devil and dissembling looks, 
And yet to win her, all the world to nothing! 

Thus the old-new Serpent has again fascinated this 
right daughter of our first mother Eve, with the 
irresistible charm of original sin, of Satan incar- 
nate. Still he soon hears from the outside his own 
inner counterstroke voiced by Queen Margaret in 
her frantic curse: 

On thee, the troubler of the world's peace — 
The worm of Conscience still begnaw thy soul — 

as it has been doing and win. continue to do in him, 
and in her as well, for she knows all about it, being 
quite his female counterpart. 

Such are the two voices, which the poet still 
further makes real and externalizes in the two mur- 
derers whom Richard has hired to stab his brother 
Clarence in the Tower, They represent the dua- 
lized Crookback himself as the outer monster yet 
with his inner monitor. For in the Second Mur- 
derer "that word Judgment hath bred a kind of 
Remorse", and he penitently declares that "some 
certain dregs of Conscience are yet within me", 
while the First Murderer exclaims, quite like the 
outer Richard : ' ' Remember our reward, when the 



EICEABD III. 193 

deed is done." But the Second Murderer still 
dallies like the inner Richard over his Conscience : 
" I '11 not meddle with it ; it makes a man a coward ; 
a man cannot steal but it accuseth him ; a man can- 
not swear but it checks him; it beggars any man 
that keeps it" — whereupon the vacillator braces 
himself up to doing the deed of guilt along with his 
conscienceless companion. But at once we hear the 
counterstroke of Conscience in his soul-wrung 
lament : 

A bloody deed and desperately dispatched! 
How fain, like Pilate, would I wash my hands 
Of this most grievous guilty murder done. 
Take thou the fee — 

First murderer in reply: "Go, coward as thou 
art ! ' ' wherein we may foresee Lady Macbeth wash- 
ing her hands in sleep, and crying, "Out, damned 
spot ! ' ' and may also forebear melancholy Hamlet 's 
far-echoing line of will-lessness : "Thus Con- 
science does make cowards of us all!" But the 
main point is, that now we behold the two Richards 
thrown out into two contrasted characters which 
prefigure his double personality with its inner con- 
flict and final fate. 

Richard, accordingly, reaches his supreme goal, 
which is the throne of England, through a success- 
ful career of treachery and murder. But his Con- 
science, especially as reflected in his dream-life, has 
meanwhile not kept idle; on the contrary it has 
been liounding him like a Fury all through his 



194 SHAKESPE ABE'S LIFE-DBAMA 

underworld just during the hours devoted to re- 
pose. Whereof the wife at his side gives her 
startling testimony : 

For never yet one hour in his bed 

Did I enjoy the golden dew of sleep, 

But with his timorous dreams was still awak 'd. 

Thus Richard like Macbeth through his guilt ' ' hath 
murdered Sleep", and therefore like him Richard 
"shall sleep no more", for it is Sleep which breaks 
his waking will and unleashes all the dream-fiends 
of his nether life to harry his rest. 

The consummation of this dream-world of Rich- 
ard is shudderingly poetized in the last Act when 
the ghosts of all his murdered kindred and friends 
are marshaled before his frenzied imagination in 
sleep, till he starts up at first in prayer, from 
which, however, he soon recovers: 

Have mercy, Jesu ! Soft ! I did but dream I 
0, coward Conscience, how dost thou afflict me ! 
The lights burn blue — it is now dead midnight — 
Cold fearful drops stand on my trembling flesh. 

Thus he again turns vengefully upon that inward 
monitor of his, and punisher too, when the soldier 
in him exclaims, ''What do I fear? myself? 
There's none else by." Hereupon Richard begins 
a talk with Richard; the two Richards have to- 
gether a dialogue like the two murderers — or is it 
a monologue representing a kind of double per- 
sonality? At any rate Richard Crookback or rather 



BICHABD III. 195 

Richard Crooksoul, has finally been made aware of 
his two contradictory natures, both of which now 
are tongued against each other, and engage in a 
furious word-duel, as desperate as any outer sword- 
combat. 

I am a villain ; yet I lie, I am not. — 
Fool, of thyself speak well ; fool, do not flatter. 
My Conscience hath a thousand several tongues 
And every tongue brings in a several tale. 
And every tale condemns me for a villain. 

Thus the sworder Conscience seems to have gotten 
the better in the long battle, for hark to Richard 's 
soul-riven groans : 

I shall despair — there is no creature loves me ; 
And if I die, no soul will pity me ; 
Nay, wherefore should they? since that I myself 
Find in myself no pity to myself. 

So completely has he stopped every sluice of pity 
for others, that he no longer can shed even a drop 
of self-pity in his last need. Conscience here turns 
him under, and the hitherto fearless soldier now 
confesses openly his new fear, not to himself but to 
his fellow-soldier Ratcliff, who calls him out of 
himself : 

By the Apostle Paul, shadows to-night 
Have struck more terror to the soul of Richard, 
Than can the substance of ten thousand soldiers 
Armed in proof and led by shallow Richmond ! 



196 SHAEESPE ABE'S LIFE-DBAMA. 

Still he cannot turn back, having set his life ''upon 
a east"; soon we catch that last signal of the 
Demon's despairing energy, though still defiant: 

A horse ! a horse ! my kingdom for a horge ! 

And so he dies his deathless death, being vitalized 
anew into eternal life by the art of the poet. With 
his last breath Eicliard unhorsed stakes his throne, 
the grand goal of his ambition, and the hard won 
fruit of all his crimes, for a charger with which 
to meet his competitor. But that is the ultimate 
throw of the world-wagering gambler against Con- 
science, who is now voiced triumphantly by the 
triumphing Richmond. 

Here we may take a brief side-look at the poet 
in his factory. He had before him an older play 
which still exists, entitled The true Tragedy of 
Richard the Third, and which furnished him much 
material in events, in characters, and even in words 
for his work. So we may watch him fishing out of 
the time-stream an abandoned piece of floating 
wreckage which he takes to his workshop and 
transfigures to an eternal temple of the Muse. Of 
this unique power of his let us test one little speci- 
men, only a single line, which in the old play jolts 
prosily thus: 

A horse! a horse! a fresh horse! 

Sample now Shakespeare 's corresponding line cited 
above, and feel to the full the difference and then 
tell it, if you can. Mark well that this most strik- 



BICRAED III. 197 

ing dramatic incident is here handed to him di- 
rectly, that even the cue in the first words "A 
horse! a horse!" is shouted at him by the old 
unknown poet; but now behold the sudden meta- 
morphosis of death-dealing prose into life-giving 
poetry — the last and topmost utterance of Richard. 
Yet the old versifier cannot stop here at the grand 
culmination, he lets his finished Richard babble 
on in a prolonged dying self-colloquy. But peace 
be to his nameless ashes, for he gave his old for- 
gotten bones to William Shakespeare who built 
them into a new body and breathed into it his 
breath of immortal life. 

Such is, in general, the place which we assign 
to Richard III in the evolution of Shakespeare's 
total Life-drama. It is the bridge from his em- 
bryonic dramaturgy to his more fully individual- 
ized work, from his Marlowese to his Shakespearese, 
from his vanishing otherness to his dawning self- 
ness. And the chief spiritual trait which signalizes 
this transition is his employment of Conscience for 
his characterisation. Therein he mirrored the 
spirit of his age, which was becoming more and 
more inoculated with the authority of Conscience, 
especially through the incoming religious revival 
sprung of the Puritans. That Shakespeare shared 
in this grand renascence of the time's spirit crops 
out along the whole line of his plays from begin- 
ning to end, from this his early Richard III, up to 
his middle-aged Hamlet, and thence onward till the 
poet's finality in Tempest. May we not hear a far- 



198 SHAKESPEAEE'S LIFE-DBAMA 

off echo of Richard's and Clarence's throes of 
Conscience in the tortures of Alonso (Tempest 
III. 3), whose thunderous words still keep up the 
massive reverberations first heard in the present 
drama, which, however, continue rolling through 
the entire sweep of his active Life-drama for quite 
a quarter of a century: 

0, it is monstrous, monstrous! 
Methought, the billows spoke, and told me of it; 
The winds did sing it to me; and the thunder, 
That deep and dreadful organ-pipe, pronounc'd 
The name of Prosper : it did bass my trespass. 
Therefore my son i ' the ooze is bedded — 

as the penalty of the father's wrongful act. An- 
other instance will not let itself be forgotten here : 
Conscience functioning through the imagination 
we have found often at work in Richard III; but 
later in the poet's Macbeth it is augmented and in- 
tensified till it becomes quite the entire instru- 
mentality of bringing home to the doer his deed 
of guilt. 

Thus we find that Richard III not only reaches 
backward, but also strikes forward, being a sort of 
prelude or exordium, to the grand Shakespearian 
Pan-drama. It touches certain fundamental notes 
which we shall often hear in the future. This 
leading-motive (as we may call it for illustration) 
of Conscience sounds one chief theme attuning the 
poet's total achievement from overture to finale. 
In this single preluding play of Richard III, we 



BICHABD III. 199 

may hear the word Conscience voiced some fifteen 
times, according to our count, not to mention sev- 
eral sjmonyms which would add at least as many 
more passages of like meaning to the tally. And 
I hold it is this special characteristic which gives 
to the play its enduring interest and popularity. 
It has something eternally important to tell you 
every time you hear it or read it, something not 
merely told for your pleasure, but for your salva- 
tion. And also the fact should be noted that 
Richard III must have been a public favorite from 
its theatrical birthday. The cunning, irresistible, 
demonic Crookback was one of the sovereign roles 
of Burbage the actor, as report has transmitted. 
But more significant is the ocular proof that six 
separate editions of this play were printed in 
Quarto before the Folio of 1623, and several after- 
wards. Thus it rises distinctly out of the theatre 
into literature, and stays risen, till this moment, 
when for a little instance you and I are studying 
its text with fresh zest and insight — I at least after 
more than sixty years' acqauintance. The bare 
pyramidal grandeur of Marlowe, on the other hand, 
has no such hold on the popular heart. Why? I 
have given my answer to the problem already : the 
absence of Lady Conscience. 

And here we shall set down the small but pur- 
poseful item that of the mentioned six separate 
Quarto editions of the present drama, four on 
the title-page hyphenate the spelling of the au- 
thor's name, thus: Shake-speare. A little wink, 



200 SHAKESPE ABE'S LIFE-DBAMA 

to be sure ; but it suggests again the warlike spear- 
shaker now to the eye, which suggestion the poet's 
contemporary fellow-craftsmen, Spenser, Jonson, 
Digges, repeat in laudatory verse. But especially 
for this play such a bellicose hint becomes signifi- 
cant, since Richard is through and through the 
fighting man, and exhibits strikingly the purely 
military spirit in its origin and outcome. For war 
spells destruction, even when used as a temporary 
means, as at times it has to be. Richard is the war- 
trained destroyer, from youth up, and the full 
logical sweep of his career is never to stop till he 
destroys his enemies, his friends, his kin, and him- 
self. Such is the complete cycle of his character as 
drawn by the poet. 

Had Shakespeare seen anything of the sort in 
his own experience? Undoubtedly, for England's 
chief business and pre-oceupation for years had 
been to drill soldiers and sailors to meet the long- 
threatened Spanish invasion. As before said, 
Shakespeare could not help participating both in 
the work and in the spirit of the time, which was 
essentially militaristic, had to be so. He must have 
actually witnessed and possibly have served under 
some captains like Richard, for they never fail to 
grow in such a crisis. During his several years of 
Drifting he certainly had the opportunity. So 
from this point of view, the present drama may be 
regarded as Shakespeare's study of militarism, 
how it is like to mould human character, unless 
there be found some re-agent or corrective. Rich- 



BICHABD III. 201 

ard the soldier has come to think that he can run 
Conscience through with his sword, and fling it 
away as the corpse of his adversary. He kills all 
his own except his own Conscience, which keeps 
stabbing him till the last thrust. 

The opening soliloquy of the play may be re- 
garded as bringing before us Shakespeare himself 
looking back upon the warlike scenes he has just 
passed through after the defeat of the Spanish 
Armada : 

Now are our brows bound with victorious wreaths. 
Our bruised arms hung up for monuments. 
Our stern alarums chang'd to merry meetings, 
Our dreadful marches to delightful measures: 
Grim-visag 'd War has smooth 'd his wrinkled front. 

All of which young Shakespeare had very recently 
experienced, and probably every man in his au- 
dience. Do we not to-day (1920) here in America 
witness similar occurrences at the home-coming of 
our troops from the war abroad? But what is 
Richard, who has been fed on soldiering from his 
babyhood, now to do with himself "in this wea"k, 
piping time of peace?" His vocation, his world is 
gone ; and as there is no war on hand, he will start 
his own personal war, for just that is not merely 
his business, but his very selfhood, which has be- 
come as crooked as his body, and ever more blood- 
thirsty. Besides, as all these wars of the White 
and Red Roses during a hundred years have been 



202 SHAKESPEABE'S LIFE-DBAMA 

waged to seize a throne, he will now begin his 
own war for that same end. Why not? Hence 

Plots have I laid, inductions dangerous 
By drunken prophecies, libels, dreams — 

And so his new battle opens. I believe Shakespeare 
saw Richard, talked with him, and caught his spirit, 
which he then threw back more than a hundred 
years and incarnated in the similar but doubtless 
more terrible Yorkian time of English history, 
wherein he found his full freedom of portraiture, 
since it had been hostile to the present House of 
Tudor, which could not be so easily shown its right 
image to its very face. 

In this early play we are to note Shakespeare's 
use of dream-life to let the unconscious underworld 
of man play into his conscious overworld for the 
purpose of bringing him to judgment. Hamlet also 
has ''bad dreams", and hesitates to kill himself 
through fear of "what dreams may come" during 
that sleep of death. Now in this subliminal dream- 
life Shakespeare makes Conscience the sovereign, 
but dethrones her in the supra-liminal waking-life ; 
at least such is Richard's case. His double per- 
sonality shows itself unconscienced in his outer 
deed, but conscienced in his inner underself, where 
is seated his Minos or infernal judge, meting to 
him with stern compensation the penalty of his 
conduct. 

Over and over again in various forms Richard 
has reproached Conscience with cowardice, as it 



BICHABD III. 203 

wells up spontaneously from below and halts his 
action. Such is the plague which pursues him into 
his last thought, whose words still reveal his deepest 
conflict, as with self-violence he chokes down his 
retributive dream-life bursting up inwardly: 

Let not our babbling dreams affright our souls ; 
Conscience is but a word that cowards use, 
Devis'd at first to keep the strong in awe; 
Our strong arms be our Conscience, swords our law. 

Thus the ghostly sworder Conscience springs forth 
again as his internal challenger, from whom he 
rapidly rides away into the thick of his outer fight, 
which is his last. 

That Shakespeare himself experienced some such 
struggle of Conscience, we firmly believe, for rea- 
sons already set forth. Here, however, we would 
stress another point of much significance in the 
poet's career: without the psychical habit of Con- 
science, there could have risen no great modern 
English drama, no complete characterisation. That 
inner turn upon the self and the holding it up to 
its ideal standard give the possibility of the new 
and deeper character-making in the Shakespearian 
sense. So our greatest dramatist opens his career 
with a dramatisation of Conscience, the most dis- 
tinctive act of his age's soul-life, which now looks 
inward and develops the self through scrutinizing 
and representing its weakness and its strength. 
Conscience is still to-day the first and best char- 



204 SHAKESPE ABE'S LIFE-DEJMA. 

acter-builder, the very base of our personality's 
edifice. 

So we conceive the process : in Conscience the 
individual rounds himself out within himself; he 
calls himself before his own tribunal, where he is 
judge, jury, sentencer, and may be executioner. 
This act the whole nation was performing in 
Elizabeth's time; every responsive man was look- 
ing into his life and making a great fresh read- 
justment of himself to the moral order of the 
world. Thus the individual becomes a new spir- 
itual totality in himself, and is set in motion with 
a new energy, creating for himself also quite an- 
other social environment, but especially originating 
the new drama in which he is to be adequately por- 
trayed. Hence we are to observe that this series 
of four earliest plays, called sometimes the Yorkian 
Tetralogy, is of basic importance in the education 
of Shakespeare unto his supreme self-realisation. 
The new-born world-man has appeared and is to 
have his spiritual picture taken in his various rela- 
tions by the artist who knows him best just through 
his own experience. 

We should here repeat that this rise of Con- 
science in the English nation is mainly, though not 
wholly, the work of the Puritans, who after Shake- 
speare's time will undergo a grand evolution out of 
and beyond the poet. But of that we need not now 
speak. 

Here then closes what we call the First Epoch of 
Shakespeare's Apprenticeship, which sets forth his 



KicMAnn 111. 205 

time of Collaboration, when he was going through 
the primary school of his art. These were full 
years for his England, bringing the tension of the 
Armada crisis and its first reactions. The con- 
vulsive age of the Roses gave him a congenial 
dramatic setting, as well as a political discipline 
for his coming work. Social revolt also he got to 
see and to know in his wild fellow-dramatists ; still 
with him it was at present hardly an inner living 
experience but rather some knowledge won and 
appropriated on the outside. Possibly he forefelt 
Marlowe's personal tragedy from the start. At any 
rate Shakespeare's own tragic world is to come 
much later. 



206 SHAKESPEARE'S LIFE-DBAMA. 

CHAPTER SECOND. 

Imitation — Experim ent. 

Out of Shakespeare's time of Collaboration we 
now pass to the second stage of his Apprenticeship 
which is distinctively his imitative or acquisitive 
Epoch, for he has discovered what he lacks and at 
once goes after it. Hence he now seems reaching 
out and aj^propriating whatever is needful for his 
new vocation, which aspires even beyond the 
drama; we shall behold him in quest of an uni- 
versal poetic knowledge and practice. Hence this 
Epoch has the character of a great spiritual expan- 
sion, whose push is to transcend former limits. 

There is no doubt that his previous state of 
Collaboration appears to him, looking backward, as 
a time of unfreedom, pupilage, subservience, per- 
chance necessary for his first dramatic schooling as 
well as for his bread and butter. But now he feels 
himself able to begin on his own account and to 
compose a separate, independent drama or poem; 
he is to find in himself and to unfold the untram- 
meled bent of his genius, of which he has become 
conscious. Already Richard III we conceive to 
have been for him a kind of Declaration of Inde- 
pendence, since this play, in spite of its mighty self- 
assertion, bears still the traces of an hitherto 
dominant but now over-borne collaborator. Thus 
two authors, or their opposite tendencies, fight in it 



IMITATION AND EXPEEIMENT 207 

as well as its two historic protagonists, Richard and 
Richmond, for sovereignty ; and at the close of the 
combat not Richmond alone is triumphant, but also 
Shakespeare. His Richard III, though hatched out 
as his own big chick, still shows pieces of Marlowese 
egg-shell unshed till the last stroke. 

So we may say that the poet and his work become 
individualized in this present Epoch, though its 
unfolding by no means reaches yet the highest 
bloom of his individuality. He is simply passing 
through another stage in his rise toward complete 
self-realisation. He is seeking to master and to 
make-over all the transmitted forms of literature, 
especially the poetic; he is testing himself, finding 
himself out, trying his genius on the cultural tradi- 
tion of the past by imitative reproduction, yet inde- 
pendent. Hence this may also be called his experi- 
mental Epoch, for we shall find in it a greater and 
more varied number of essays in verse than at any 
other time of his career. He is testing and choosing 
his implements of poetry, but in such a creative 
way that his test becomes itself an eternal poem. 
Daringly he is winning a grand new experience of 
his art, and therewith the ultimate experience of 
experimentation itself. Thus we may glimpse him 
very busy in his present workshop, marking well 
the transition from his former laboratory in eon- 
junction with others to his present laboratory with 
and in himself. 

But what is the date of this Epoch? Again we 
have to confess that the time-limits cannot be laid 



208 SHAKESPEABB'S LIFE-DBAMA 

down to the exact year, though its general outline 
may be duly calendared. The five or six years 
which lie between 1589-90 and 1594-5, embrace the 
labors as well as the unique discipline of the man 
during the present Epoch. Its essential fact we 
have sought to designate by several labels — imi- 
tative, appropriative, expansive, experimental — 
indicating the poet in his resolute search for the 
right path of his Genius. 

And now we are brought to grapple with the 
diversified contents of this Epoch, and, if possible, 
to arrange them into some kind of transparent 
order. For we find before us on the surface a 
recalcitrant mass of multifarious versicles and 
divers sorts of poetry, which sorely need some 
method of classification. They all burst up into 
this Epoch, and show its creative variety as well as 
its unfettered spontaneity. We have essayed sev- 
eral methods of organizing the rebellious material 
(which therein reflects somewhat of the poet's own 
spirit during this time), but at last we have fallen 
back upon the old and sometimes decried division 
of poetry into epic, lyric, and dramatic, all which 
forms we find Shakespeare employing and per- 
chance testing in the course of this Epoch. Accord- 
ingly we shall dare cut up Shakespeare's poetic 
self into three main strands for the purpose of 
threading the somewhat criss-cross labyrinth of his 
writings during the present phasis of his evolution. 
Let, then, these be our larger headings under this 
Epoch : 



IMITATION AND EXPEBIMENT 209 

I. The Epical Shakespeare. 

11. The Lyrical Shakespeare. 

III. The Dramatic Shakespeare. 

We naturally wonder at and inquire about the 
cause of this sudden exijansion of the poet's horizon 
after his rather limited and concentrated work of 
dramatic Collaboration. First of all, we have to 
say that such was the inborn aspiration of the man ; 
such too was the bound-bursting push of this early 
Epoch of him, exemplified also in his wont-defying 
master Marlowe. Shakespeare at this point prac- 
tically said to himself in the words of one of his 
characters : 

Now I am cabined, cribbed, confined, bound in — 

whereupon he makes a break over the prison walls 
of his spirit, and gives a plunge toward his new 
Epoch. 

Moreover the time had taught him that he needed 
to know and to be something beyond Marlowe, who 
had the old Latin training but not much of the 
modern Italian culture, which seemed not to appeal 
to him victoriously as it did to Shakespeare, 
wherein the latter shows himself the more uni- 
versal man. Indeed Marlowe was by nature more 
Northern than Southern, more Gothic than Classic, 
in spite of his choice of some Greco-Roman themes. 
There is little doubt that his Faustus was Marlowe 's 
most congenial and typical work, and the one which 
tapped the deepest and most lasting sources of 
Teutonic spirit in Europe, as is shown by the con- 



210 fin AKE8PE ABE'S LIFE-DEAMA. 

tinuous stream of Faust art gushing from this 
earliest fountain till now, of which the culmination 
is Goethe's German masterpiece. Shakespeare's 
Hamlet has been often deemed ultimately cognate 
with Goethe's Faust, especially in that deepest 
psychological problem of man, the relation of his 
intellect to his will. A modern German poet (Prei- 
ligrath) has entitled his most effective lyric Ger- 
many is Hamlet, and hence destined to end in the 
Hamlet tragedy. But to-day we hear even more 
poignantly and profoundly Germany is Faust, 
exemplified in the deeply brooded ever-welling 
Faust My thus, which realizes itself so persistently 
and so variously in the Teutonic folk-lore. Strangely 
English Marlowe started, not the original tale but 
the poetic embodiment of it in the prolific time of 
Queen Elizabeth, and became one of the influences 
which impelled Goethe to his supreme achievement. 

Accordingly we are to see Shakespeare in this 
Epoch deflecting from the more Northern Marlowe 
to the Mediterranean w^orld with its melodious sun- 
beshone art. On the other hand, Shakespeare's 
new turn of career seems to have made Marlowe 
bend a little toward the same direction, in what is 
usually deemed his last poetic upburst, his Hero 
and Leander, left a fragment which seemingly 
breaks off with his sudden death. 

So let the salient fact of this Epoch be now duly 
signaled : The poet Italianizes, he starts to absorb- 
ing the culture of modern Italy, especially in its 
poetic form. That is, he makes a striking transi- 



IMITATION AND EXPERIMENT 211 

tion from his old classic training, chiefly won at 
Stratford, to that of the Italian Renascence (or 
Renaissance), into which he finds himself suddenly- 
plunged when he gets settled in London. He ob- 
serves that his foremost literary associates are more 
or less imbued with Italian literature, that re-born 
Italy furnishes largely the time's poetic and es- 
pecially dramatic material, that the age itself, along 
with Elizabeth's tone-giving court, is Italianizing. 
Now we have already detected that Shakespeare is 
peculiarly sensitive to the great spiritual currents 
of his environment, and seeks not only to assimilate 
but also Xo reproduce them in his art. Hence we 
have to conceive him pushing at once to appropriate 
and to imitate that fresh renascent world of Italian 
spirit, which, we may add, will stay by him and 
deeply influence ■ the whole sweep of his London 
Pan-drama, of which the supposed last specimen, 
Tlfie Tempest, is still Italianized through and 
through in locality, in coloring, and in content. So 
the poet, in this his peculiarly imitative and appro- 
priative Epoch, takes up and recreates in himself 
that great world-movement which arose and cul- 
minated in modern Italy, as it advanced out of the 
Middle Ages. 

Now this is a cardinal and lasting turn in the 
poet's life and work; hence we feel the right to 
attempt some construction of it, though it be quite 
undocumented. 

(1) All are agreed that Shakespeare must have 
read old Chaucer, who is already full of the first 



212 SEAKESPE ABE'S LIFE-DBAMA 

freshest and greatest literary flowering of the 
Italian Renascence in Dante, Petrarch, and Boc- 
caccio. Thus the Italian movement had been work- 
ing its way some two centuries in England when 
it burst up with the grand Elizabethan resurgence 
to renewed energy, in which Shakespeare pro- 
foundly j)articipated. (2) In London there was 
an Italian cultural circle at whose center stood John 
(Giovanni) Florio, son of an Italian refugee who 
was a Waldensian clergyman. Florio wrote an 
English-Italian manual of instruction and a dic- 
tionary, made translations into English, and gave 
lessons in his native tongue and in French. He 
enjoyed the friendship of the Earl of Southampton, 
our poet's noble patron, to whom were dedicated 
Venus and Adonis and also Lucrece. Among 
Florio 's pupils we are going to place William 
Shakespeare, whose aspiration soon bred the resolve 
to learn Italian and then to pay a visit to Italy 
itself, at that time the grand magnet of all edu- 
cated travelers, especially the English. (3) The 
poet's London environment overflowed with trans- 
lations, adaptations, imitations from the Italian, of 
which he must have caught and assimilated the 
spiritual quintessence. The air was full of Italy's 
poetic forms, especially sonnets, novels, romantic 
narrative poems, (epopees). One of these Eliza- 
bethan translations, Fairfax's Tasso (printed in 
1600) has shown itself enduring till to-day; Shake- 
speare may have read some of it in manuscript. 
But altogether the supreme, the immortal per- 



IMITATION AND EXPEEIMENT 213 

formance of this Italianizing time is Spenser's 
Fairy Queen (first three books published in 1590) 
whose influence wrought very decisively upon the 
outreaehing Shakespeare at the start of the present 
Epoch. 

But the happy-making incident as well as the 
most profound and lasting experience of this Epoch 
is the poet's visit to Italy, which has been placed 
somewhere about 1592-3 when the theatres were 
closed on account of the plague, and Shakespeare 
was free of business to take a trip abroad as well 
to escape from the death-stricken London. His 
intimate knowledge of the cities of Northern Italy 
(though he makes mistakes, as do well-prepared 
guide-books and even the Italians themselves) indi- 
cates eye-sight 's own inspection ; but the main proof 
for us is the poetic atmosphere which we feel in 
his Venice and in his Verona, and which the poet 
recreates out of what he has immediately sensed 
and inwardly experienced on the spot, not out of 
what he may have heard or read. Of course this 
Shakespearian visit to Italy has been stoutly con- 
tested, since there is for it no straight-out docu- 
mentary script. Naturally the rather thick-skinned 
biographer Sir Sidney Lee scouts it, affirming that 
the poet's Italian scenes "lack the intimate detail 
which would attest a first-hand experience of the 
country. ' ' But Shakespeare 's reproduction of Italy 
shows something far deeper and subtler than the 
"intimate detail" of particulars, though he knows 
many of these too. Hence telling such an opinion, 



214 SHAKESPEARE'S LIFE-DBAMA 

Sir Sidney Lee has told more truth about himself 
than about Shakespeare. In his biographic books 
he has gathered an enormous concourse of facts, 
for which we certainly should be grateful ; and in 
gratitude his readers may well crown him the 
champion biographic rag-picker of the world, even 
if he seems unable to sew his tatters into a whole 
garment. And such whole garment should also 
reveal somewhat of the soul which throbs the same 
out of itself into life's external habiliments. 

Accordingly we shall not only accept as a fact, 
but also as a significant turning-point in the de- 
velopment as well as in the writ of Shakespeare, 
his visit to Italy. Though neither the poet nor 
anybody else has left any direct account of it, still 
its effect can be felt underlying a large list of his 
productions. We hold that it meant as much, yea 
more to Shakespeare than Goethe's pivotal Italian 
Journey nearly two hundred years later did to the 
great German poet, who, however, has recorded 
fully the meaning of Italy in his life and work, 
whence may come help to us for understanding his 
English poetical brother. 

Another event which must have produced a 
strong impression upon Shakespeare was the vio- 
lent death of his alter ego, unbridled Kit Marlowe, 
who was slain in a quarrel over a dubious female 
at Deptford near London, May 1593. It is likely 
that Shakespeare had returned from Italy at this 
time. Still wherever he was, he could not help 
seeing Marlowe's tragic nemesis realized in the 



IMITATION AND EXPEBIMENT 215 

outcome of the man himself. The critic Francis 
Meres in 1598 states that ''Christopher Marlowe 
was stabbed to death by a bawdy serving-man, a 
rival of his in his lewd love." The Puritan 
Vaughn in 1600 pointed still more sharply the 
poet's self-returning nemesis in the barbed phrase 
that "Marlowe's very dagger was thrust back into 
his own eye" by his assailant so that his brain 
oozed out and he died. Thus Marlowe's cotemp- 
oraries conceived and wrote down his tragic retri- 
bution, probably with a justice fabulously poetic. 
Still the fact of his violent death in which the 
catastrophic woman was involved, is generally ac- 
cepted. So Marlowe also (like Shakespeare) had 
his Dark Lady, who, however, rapidly haled him 
to his fate. 

Did Shakespeare ever give due poetic recognition 
of what Marlowe had been to him in the develop- 
ment of his genius? I think to find in his Sonnets 
many traces of grateful though veiled homage to 
his master. Thus I construe the warmly conceived 
eulogy in Sonnet 78 : 

So oft I have invok 'd thee for my Muse 

And found such fair assistance in my verse. 

As every alien pen hath got my use 

And under thee their poesy disperse. 

Thine eyes, that taught the dumb on high to 

sing 
And heavy ignorance aloft to fly , 
Have added feathers to the learned 's wing 



216 SHAKESPEARE'S LIFE-DBAMA. 

And given grace a double majesty. 
Yet he most proud of that which I compile 
Whose influence is thine and horn of thee; — 
In others ' works thou dost but mend the style, 
And arts with thy sweet graces graced be ; 
But thou art all my art, and dost advance 
As high as learning my rude ignorance. 

"Who is this addressee "thou"? Many conjectures 
we read — a woman, a man, the poet's own genius, 
even some abstraction. But to our mind this sonnet 
intimates in a number of ways Shakespeare 's strong 
regard for and deep mental indebtedness both to 
the learning and the poetry of Marlowe, though the 
latter be unnamed. Indeed it suggests Marlowe's 
high p'lace in the poetic firmanent of the time, his 
influence upon other poets and specially upon 
Shakespeare. If I mistake not, there is a feeling 
of personal gratitude which warms this little poem 
in spite of its puns, as if coming from the heart of 
the pupil to his loved master. 

Recurring now to the fore-mentioned divisions of 
this widely expansive and experimental Epoch, in 
which we find Shakespeare, still young, imitating 
all the transmitted forms of poetry (epical, lyrical, 
dramatic) we shall make a start with the first. 
Taking the historic development of Greek Litera- 
ture as the earliest and most natural growth of 
poetry hithereto known, we find that the Homeric 
Epos is the grand overture which is followed by 
the multitudinous Lyrists of Greece, to whom sue- 



TTJE EPICAL SnAKESPKAKT: 217 

eeeds the Drama, specially the Attic, headed by 
superb old Aeschylus. It is significant to note that 
from this point of view we witness the poet Shake- 
speare evolving along the lines of his race's poetic 
evolution, and repeating individually in himself 
the universal genesis of Literature, according to its 
primal creative example. Moreover Shakespeare 
taps that antique Hellenic fountain, inasmuch as 
he was probably not very learned in Greek, through 
Latin, Italian, and English conduits, each of which 
has its own distinct coloring and elaboration of the 
original material. Hence the chief interest now is 
to watch our poet going back to and drinking of the 
very creation of poetry, insofar as this has been 
put into the form of Letters. 



The Epical Shakespeare. 

Not a great national spontaneous Epos like 
Homer's twinned masterpiece; not a vast supra- 
mundane action like Milton 's ; not a somewhat arti- 
ficial and imitated yet gloriously poetical structure 
with a profound world-historical outlook, like Vir- 
gil 's and Tasso 's deathless poems ; — these epical 
experiments of Shakesi^eare (for such they must be 
finally considered), are relatively small affairs, 
confining themselves mostly to one sexed human 
couple with their varied interactions of sensuous 
love. Rather must we go back to Italian Ariosto 
and perchance Boiardo to find their form-giving 



218 SHAKESPE ABE'S LIFE-DBAMA. 

first source, though they shun the Carlovingian and 
the Arthurian medieval Mythus for their story, 
which they in two cases take from the Classic 
world. Here, then, we may behold the poet Italian- 
izing himself in meter, rhyme, stanza, theme (as 
love), and more subtly in poetic atmosphere. Still 
he gives at the same time a strong interfusion of 
English landscape and character, while sea-souled, 
aggressive England cannot help showing herself in 
the very wave-roll and sledge-stroke of her lan- 
guage. 

Three narrative poems of the earlier Shakespeare, 
but finished after his Italian experience, we set 
down under the above caption, putting thus to- 
gether one phase of his imitative, far-extended 
testing of himself for his future poetic career. 
These three poems are found in his works under 
the names of (1) Venus and Adonis, (2) Lucrece, 
(3) A Lover's Complaint. They are essentially of 
one class, simple, idyllic, amatory, for which our 
name would be the Idyllic Epopee. 

To be kept well in memory and to be strongly 
emphasized is the prime fact, that a woman stands 
at the center of all three poems, of course differ- 
ently charactered and with her own separate con- 
flict. So they conjointly reveal the poet, again 
making the woman the pivot of his poesy, as she lay 
in the heart of his experience past and present, at 
Stratford and at London. 

All three show the new ambition of the young 
poet, and reveal his limit-transcending aspiration. 



THE EPICAL SHAKESPEABE 219 

He now is seen branching off to a fresh domain or 
his poetic art, testing his rather callow wings in a 
foreign far-away flight. The three poems, though 
cast into one general mould, and imbreathed with 
one basic spirit, can be seen to represent three dif- 
ferent stages of the epical Shakespeare, till he 
rounds out this unique experience and rises above 
it to the next higher. So let us scan the poet as he 
makes trial of that new poetic form here called the 
Idyllic Epopee. 

1. Venus and Adonis. Such was the title of 
Shakespeare's first printed book, which was author- 
ized by himself and published under his name given 
in a dedication but not on the title page. It was 
entered in the Stationers ' Register April 1593, and 
then issued to the world with a Latin motto taken 
from Ovid, in which the poet claims to turn away 
from the taste of the populace (this is supposed to 
be a side-glance at the stage of the time), so that 
henceforth he will quaff only Castaly's pure inspir- 
ation. Thus Shakespeare seems disguisedly to hint 
a new turn in his poetic vocation aside from the 
drama — he is making a fresh experiment with his 
Genius. 

The same fact is at least hinted in the dedication 
of Venus and Adonis to a noble patron, the Earl of 
Southampton, And if this "first heir of my inven- 
tion" finds the favor which he hoi^es with the 
lordly aristocrat, "I vow to take advantage of all 
idle hours till I have honored you with some graver 
labor. ' ' Here is evidently some grand poetical plan 



220 SEAKE8PE ABE'S LIFE-DBAMA. 

touched upon ; possibly the forthcoming Lucrece is 
the allusion, but more probable is it that the loftier 
design of a great national Epos was floating before 
the poet's imagination, roused perhaps by rivalry 
with Spenser's Fairy Queen. But if this present 
work "prove deformed", then I shall ''never after 
ear so barren a land ' ', in which statement seems to 
lurk a wee premonitory doubt concerning this new 
poetic tendency. At any rate we may here see 
Shakespeare looking away from his more plebeian 
dramatic career to an aristocratic patronage, which 
at the time could only be reached through the 
Italian vogue then at its height. 

Can we catch some faint glimpse of the poet's 
spiritual phasis at this moment? He had, we may 
conjecture, returned recently from his trip to Italy, 
and was full of its influence. We have timed that 
trip about 1592-3. And his poetic creativity, we 
may well believe, could not have lain idle under 
such a stimulating environment. He was still in 
his freshest genetic years, twenty eight or nine of 
age, and could not help poetizing. Why should 
he not take some of his unfinished work along with 
him, as did his poetic world-brother Goethe many 
decades afterwards, who wrought over, remodeled, 
and versified his Ipkigenia and his Tasso in the 
beautiful Southern sunland of genius. Now we 
are going to think or dream (if one wishes to say 
so) that Shakespeare carried with him to Italy his 
Venus and Adonis, which he revised and perhaps 
rewrote in the delicious but languorous Italian 



TRE EPICAL SHAKESPEABE 221 

clime, for that is the unique atmosphere of the 
aforesaid poem. When he came back to England, 
full of his new poesy, he applied to an old friend, 
Richard Field formerly of Stratford, but now a 
London printer and successful bookseller, to pub- 
lish his latest, and in his view, finest production, 
under the highest possible auspices, a great Earl's 
patronage. Moreover this first edition of Venus 
and Adonis shows at all points special care in its 
typographical execution ; only one copy of it exists 
(in the Bodleian), which, however, is declared by 
the competent to be the best printed book among 
the original editions of Shakespeare, who doubtless 
now read his own proof-sheets. Here it may be 
jotted down by the way that Shakespeare's fre- 
quent employment of printing processes in his writ- 
ings has led to the supposition that when he first 
came to London, he worked for a while with printer 
Field, his fellow-townsman and family friend. In 
a few weeks the alert youth could have learned to 
pick type and handle a press, as many another has 
done since. But his stay, if it ever took place, 
could not have been long: he had a different bee 
buzzing in his brain. 

The poet 's early favorite, Ovid 's Metamorphoses, 
furnishes the story and the motive, though not the 
verse and the poetic atmosphere; these have been 
imparted by the Italian Renascence to Shakespeare, 
who breathes into such transmitted material his 
own poetic individuality, as this manifests itself 
in his adolescence. Of course for the origin of the 



222 SRAKE8PE ABE'S LIFEDBAMA. 

tale of Venus and Adonis we have to go back to all- 
creative, embryonic Hellas, whose pastoral poets, 
notably Theocritus and Bion, made use of it, and 
from these the Roman poets caught it up, and scat- 
tered it throughout cultured Europe. Ovid's tale 
of the wooing of the unwilling Hermaphroditus by 
the love-shent maiden Salmacis (Book IV. Meta- 
morphoses) is the chief source, though other pass- 
ages contribute. Thus we observe the poet to seize 
an universal Mythus first bubbling up in antique 
Greece, and then streaming down through Rome 
into the renascent and modern world, along with 
the flow of civilisation itself. 

The psychical characteristic of the poem is the 
soul's appealing resignation to sensuous passion 
on part of the woman (or goddess), while the 
youthful object of it resists. A personal experience 
we may again glimpse in these warm prolonged 
love-harangues; Anne Hathaway will keep flitting 
through the shape and the hot implorations of 
Venus. Another Stratford impress is everywhere 
stamped upon the poem : the rural scenery, the de- 
scription of tame and wild animals, the country 
sports and occupations, as well as the ready agri- 
cultural lore. 

But when we come to sip of the verse, we find it 
to taste of Italy ; the meter, the rhyme, the stanza, 
the aroma are Italianized. The poet's own cotem- 
poraries seem especially to have caught this dulcet 
poetic melody, which attuned the ear of the time to 
its luscious tingle of tones. The critic Francis 



THE EPICAL SHAKESPEABE 223 

Meres, doubtless acquainted with Shakespeare per- 
sonally, celebrates Venus and Adonis by name, pre- 
luding that "the sweet and witty soul of Ovid lives 
in mellifluous and honey-tongued Shakespeare" — a 
warble of words worthy of the singer himself. And 
the little rhymester Richard Barnfield (1598) put 
to the fore the same quality: Shakespeare's 
' ' honey -flowing vein. ' ' For this same reason Venus 
and Adonis shows a deep spiritual and poetical kin- 
ship with Romeo and Juliet, the sweet and some- 
times saccharine Italian love-tragedy of the still 
youthful poet. 

The chief objection to this delicious bit of love's 
ecstasy will always be its unmorality; not a few 
good people will strengthen the word to immorality. 
The work may be termed Shakespeare's Art of 
Love, in which he follows perchance a little too 
exuberantly his classic mentor, lascivious Ovid. It 
is the very riot of erotic adolescence; we feel that 
the poet uses the shy Adonis as a foil for the amor- 
ous raptures of Venus, who really voices the young 
Shakespeare in his unbridled sensuous mood. Pos- 
sibly here, too, lurks some secret rivalry with Mar- 
lowe, who also has turned away for a time from the 
drama and started to writing a love-idyl, his Hero 
and Leander, which is found inserted in the Sta- 
tioners' Register not far from the date of Venus 
and Adonis. Moreover, the effect of a visit to Italy 
in exciting an erotic overflow of verse may be re- 
marked even of the middle-aged, well-balanced 
Goethe, especially in his love-drunk Roman Elegies. 



224 SHAKESPE ABE'S LIFE-DBAMA. 

Hard upon the appearance of Venus and Adonis 
followed the cataclysmic tragedy of Marlowe him- 
self, which sent a life-determining shock into 
Shakespeare's very being, since he now feels the 
warning in his own case, and at once proceeds to 
set forth in writ Love's fate, for the sake of his 
own salvation. Let us never forget that his literary 
utterance is propelled from his deepest experience, 
and becomes his soul's confession and absolution. 
Within a year he has completed his Lucrece, or the 
nemesis of Love's native urg«, which work is not 
without its remedial word for the poet's own inner 
restoration from his previous excess. 

We should not fail to note that before the con- 
elusion we hear even in voluptuous Venus and 
Adonis the sharp admonition against the lurking 
peril (line 793) 

Call it not Love, for Love to heaven is fled, 
Since sweating Lust on earth usurped his name, 
Under whose simple semblance he has fed 
Upon fresh beauty blotting it with blame . . . 
Love surfeits not, Lust like a glutton dies, 
Love is all truth, Lust full of forged lies. 

These lines might be prefixed as a motto to the com- 
ing poem of Lucrece, whose moralizing character 
they foreshow, and whose diabolic incarnation of 
Lust (in Tarquin) they almost prophesy. 

2. Lucrece. May 9th 1594 there was entered in 
the Stationers ' Register ' ' A Book entitled the Rav- 
ishment of Lucrece", and soon afterwards it was 



THE EPICAL SHAKESPEABE 225 

published under the simple name "Lucrece", 
though the running title on the top of the page 
gave the fuller ' ' Rape of Luerece ' '. Thus in about 
one year and one month after the registration of 
Venus and Adonis, appears this new, and longer 
and more elaborate poem of Shakespeare, who 
writes in front of it a second dedication to his 
noble patron, the Earl of Southampton, rather 
more fulsome than the first, which was not lacking 
in that attribute. But this is the poet 's last known 
dedication, and his indulgent reader feels amply 
satisfied with these two samples. 

The poem gives some signs of haste, and of being 
written "under a single continuous inspiration ; thus 
on the whole its spiritual unity is more pronounced 
than that of Venus and Adonis. Still it has expan- 
sion overfull, but turned inwardly and subjective 
rather than outwardly descriptive of natural ob- 
jects. Very little of the Stratford landscape one 
finds here, thus it contrasts in local color with the 
previous poem, which is so panoramic in scenery. 
Both are equally diffuse, though in opposite direc- 
tions. 

But it is the moral difference between these twin 
productions, which becomes still more striking and 
profound than the physical. Indeed Luerece is not 
only the counterpart but the counterstroke to 
Venus and Adonis. The two women perform oppo- 
site female functions: Venus is the woman as 
sensuous temptress of man, Luerece is the woman 
as the moral censoress of man, here tragic and so 



226 SHAKESPE ABE'S LIFE-DBAMA, 

the more impressive. Both these feminine contrarie- 
ties became well-known to Shakespeare through 
immediate experience, and both he will employ 
hereafter, in comedy as well as in tragedy. Let 
the reader himself name the poet's two probable 
models taken from the Shakespearian household at 
Stratford. 

The story of Lucreee is uniquely Roman, which 
the school-boy poet could find in his Ovid and in 
the historian Livy. From these ancient writers it 
has been transmitted into the world's literature of 
all ages. In England before Shakespeare Chaucer 
had poetized it, and other authors had given to it 
manifold literary forms. So the theme had won a 
universality like that of Rome itself. In fact these 
two female images, the Goddess Venus and the 
mortal Lucreee, may be said to represeiit Greece 
and Rome respectively in their different charac- 
ters: that sensuous Greek harmony between man 
and nature is divine — Venus; while that stern 
Roman virtue — Lucreee — which subjects nature to 
itself, especially its own, will in the end subdue 
Hellas and her beautiful Gods along with the whole 
world. Thus the poet here projects into persons 
the two diverse souls of the antique classic world, 
from which he has derived his earliest culture 
already at Stratford, 

Again town-friend Richard Field was his printer, 
and published Lucreee, though Field seems soon to 
have transferred his Shakespearian copyrights, 
probably for a good price. Venus and Adonis was 



TEE EPICAL SEAKESPEABE 227 

peculiarly popular, as if the day's best seller, six 
editions being called for in ten years ; Lucrece did 
not sell so well by any means, as twenty-two years 
passed before the fifth edition came out. Possibly 
this fact had some influence upon the poet's cessa- 
tion of his epical stream — he having felt now his 
public's pulse, and having found his own limits. 
There is no doubt, however, that Shakespeare first 
became a famous author through his very successful 
Venus and Adonis, whose general trend indeed mir- 
rors the time's mood. Still the poet could hardly 
help feeling that such an Italianizing epical turn 
was not his true and eternal call, nor his people's 
right utterance, being rather a transitory freak of 
the folk, an imitated un-English thing, not Eng- 
land's enduring spirit embodied in an enduring 
form. So we may conceive him now looking out 
upon his new future. 

We are made to feel in Lucrece the Roman 
tendency to the abstract, if we compare it with the 
Hellenic concreteness which dominates Venus and 
Adonis. The superabundant Roman gift of osseous 
personification is duly exemplified in the addresses 
to Opportunity, to Time, to Night, and to other 
skeleton figures, which are made to rattle their 
bones in a kind of death's dance. But the most 
elaborate Roman decoration is the painting or pic- 
tured panorama which shows the destruction of 
Troy, with the sinister image of perjured Sinon, 
evidently derived from Virgil. The parallel be- 
tween the Rape of Helen and the Rape of Lucrece 



228 SEAKE8PE ABE'S LIFE-DBAMA. 

is not neglected ; each has its fatal personal as well 
as political consequences; and each heroine, the 
Greek and the Roman, represents her country's 
ideal. This long episode of Troy's fall is a little 
epos in itself, and seems here an insertion from 
some other work or plan of the poet, which may 
well reach back to Stratford when he read the 
Aeneid under master Simon Hunt, who would 
surely take the time to amplify the story to his en- 
thusiastic and promising pupil. Here, however, it 
is duly Italianized in meter, strophe, and rhyme, 
and in tongueyness. 

Still despite these boyhood reminiscences in the 
poem, they are all transformed and made to cluster 
around the form and deed of the lust-driven Tar- 
quin, who seems the least ancient, most real person 
of the action, and evidently is the direct source of 
the composition, whose first and freshest part tells 
of him and of his conflict both inner and outer. 
For conscience is here reproaching him as it did 
Richard III, and we are again told its name and 
its battle: 

Thus graceless holds he disputation 
'Tween frozen conscience and hot-burning will, 
And with good thoughts makes dispensation 
Urging the worser sense for vantage still. 

In fact we hear more than one soliloquy of Tarquin 
which recalls the Mephistophelian defiance of 
Richard III, though without the self-caricaturing 
irony which the latter sprays over himself so gen- 



TRE EPICAL SEAKESPEABE 229 

erously. For instance take this meditation of Tar- 
quin upon his deed's consequence (1. 488) : 

I have debated even in my soul 

What wrong, what shame, what sorrow I 

shall breed; 
But nothing can affection's course control, 
Or stop the headlong fury of his speed ; 
I know repentant tears ensue the deed. 
Reproach, disdain, and deadly enmity ; 
Yet strive I to embrace my infamy. 

A decided streak of Richard Crookback lurks in 
this verse, though his diabolism was ambition, not 
salacity. And we shall repeat that we cannot help 
seeing Marlowe's own figure often metamorphose 
into that of Tarquin doing the fatal deed of lust, 
with the retributive backstroke of nemesis common 
to both. Such (we think) was the living reality 
which first drove the poet to seize and elaborate 
the present theme. 

This is the only poem of Shakespeare which 
bears the sole name of a woman as the heroine. Not 
a drama of his gets its title from its female char- 
acter, though she be often the foremost personage 
of the play. Whenever the woman appears in the 
caption, she is coupled with the man ; Lucrece is 
the one exception. But now the poet is to bring 
before us in a new piece his third epical woman, so 
we may call her at least for the nonce. 

3. A Lover's Complaint. First let it be ex- 
plained that this lover is not a male but a female, 



230 SHAKESPEASE'S LIFE-DBAMA. 

a sad young maid who speaks her girlhood 's deepest 
agony through love's betrayal. The present poem 
was first printed in 1609 with the Sonnets, which 
it follows as a kind of Appendix. Thus it has the 
same external evidence for its authenticity as the 
Sonnets, and with some of them, but not with all, 
it shows a certain affinity in content, style, and 
mood. Of course its Shakespearian origin has been 
often challenged, but on grounds purely subjective 
and insufficient, as we regard the matter. 

In its general theme as well as in its poetic form 
it attaches itself to the two preceding poems, of 
which epical group it may accordingly be set down 
as the third member. It gives another phase of 
Shakespeare's treatment of love, especially of the 
woman now overborne by this passion, which also 
involves the man as her sexed counterpart. In the 
present poem we hear the oft-told story of the 
blooming adolescent girl with her first resistance to 
her youth's natural urge, then her gradual yielding 
till final submission. Somehow in her unhappy 
words we are fain to catch a far-off echo of 
Ophelia's lament: 

And I, of ladies most deject and wretched 
That sucked the honey of his music vows. 

There can be no doubt concerning the numerous 
defects of the poem. Not only is the subject along 
with its treatment hackneyed, though ever renew- 
able in the human heart, but also it shows itself 
quite everywhere a sketch as well as a fragment. 



TEE EPICAL SHAKESPEABE 231 

Underneath all the supposed lapses of the printer, 
we can see that its language needs to be thoroughly 
overhauled and clarified, as if it were only a first 
rough draught. Then it breaks off in the middle, 
without any right conclusion. The betrayer does 
not get back his own, after the usual Shakespearian 
poetic justice. At the beginning there seems to be 
preparation for a long poem: two characters are 
introduced with some detail — the secret onlooking 
listener "I", and the ''reverend man" who is 
seated at the maiden's side listening in complete 
silence to her doleful story — both of whom thence- 
forth are dropped without a word. Sketchy and 
fragmentary is the production, though that is no 
reason for taking it away from Shakespeare, who 
has left many other sketches and fragments even 
in the middle of his better dramas. He is often in- 
complete as well as careless, possibly through haste ; 
he does not always finish, he has his torsos like 
Michelangelo, like Goethe. Now these torsos are 
specially interesting and suggestive to the student 
of his spiritual evolution. The imperfect sketch 
may show the artist struggling in his workshop, 
which biographic revelation the perfect work tends 
to eliminate or smooth away. 

Such a Shakespearian torso is to our mind this 
vaguely named piece A Lover's Complaint, supply- 
ing a link, undoubtedly a small one but real, in 
the chain of the poet's development. About 1609, 
(or perhaps somewhat before) Thomas Thorpe a 
well-known publisher of the time got hold of Shake- 



232 SHAKESPEARE'S LIFE-DBAMA. 

speare's Sonnets along with this poem, both in 
manuscript doubtless. Now we dare conjecture 
that the poet himself turned these loose pieces of 
writing over to a publisher whom he knew, and 
who would issue them to the public for what they 
were worth. On the whole, they were things which 
the author had outgrown; he had quit sonneting 
by 1609, and the present rhymed and stanzaed 
epopee in Italian style belonged to an earlier i)hase 
of his growth, some fifteen years back, say about 
1594, year of Lucrece's birth. So runs our con- 
struction of this undocumented time, an imaginary 
biography, as such rehabilitation of lost parts of 
life has been scoffingly scored. Sir Sidney Lee in 
this connection affirms (Life of Shakespeare p. 161, 
new edition) that '' Shakespeare, except in the case 
of his two narrative poems made no effort to pub- 
lish any of his works", a statement wholly un- 
proved and as purely conjectural as any so-called 
imaginary biography. Very unlikely too is such a 
feeling of indifference toward the printed page in 
the psychology of authorship, as Sir Sidney might 
discover by his own example. The unbiased reader 
can detect Shakespeare carefully looking after the 
publication of several of his dramas, especially the 
greatest one, that second Quarto of Hamlet. And 
what is more natural or even praiseworthy? Con- 
sequently we shall conceive William Shakespeare, 
then thinking soon to quit London and to retire to 
Stratford, as he one day gathers up his old tran- 
scended papers of life's experience, and hands 



THE EPICAL SBAKEBPEABE 233 

them over to publisher Thorpe, who grasps the 
prize and in his dedication gratefully acclaims the 
author "as our ever-living poet." Bravo for en- 
thusiastic Thorpe with his little snatch of prophecy, 
even if it be also publishing puffery. Moreover this 
laudation would seem to indicate that Shakespeare 
was on good terms with his publisher, who could 
hardly have gotten and printed the manuscript in 
any clandestine way, its writer being in the city 
and well-known. 

Another noteworthy item about A Lover's Com- 
plaint should be taken to mind: it employs no 
Greek Mythus (like Venus and Adonis,) no Roman 
Tale (like Lucrece) for its scaffolding, but it intro- 
duces its one main character telling her own story 
directly in person. From this angle of view it re- 
sembles the modern Novel or Short Story more 
closely than the old myth-borne poetry, and in 
spirit it is more lyrical than epical, though it re- 
tains the form — meter, stanza, rhyme — of the 
Shakespearian epopee. Hence it is to be classed 
with the latter, though we feel in it a transition 
out of that stage of the poet. We may also observe 
that Shakespeare is getting more interested in the 
psychology than in the mere story of his person- 
ages ; he is turning to inner portraiture, and paying 
less regard to incident ; so we can forecast his final 
absorption in the characterful new drama as his 
most adequate expression. Indeed he carries his 
self-analysis here too far, and becomes diffuse and 
wearisome; he needs the stage to put the curb on 



234 SHAEESPEAEE'S LIFE-DRAMA. 

his riotous fancy as well as on his long-winded sub- 
jectivity, which in fact overflows to excess all his 
tpical experiments. We may think that he dis- 
covers this excess himself, and so breaks off in the 
middle of his last piece for good. He will write no 
more epopees, he has tested and appropriated their 
value for his complete evolution. His pen, if not 
restrained by the outer action of the theatre, runs 
away with his own genius, which he has found to 
be dramatic to the core. 

4. Retrospect. Such is the epical Shakespeare 
with his three Idyllic Epopees, as we have labeled, 
perhaps with some audacity, the man and a special 
phase of his work at this time, which is, in general, 
his imitative, experimental, appropriative Epoch. 
He visits Italy and Italianizes his creative power 
in a number of ways. This experience remains a 
permanent factor in his life and achievement ; we 
shall note an Italian strand woven through his 
entire Pan-drama to its last example. Even in his 
language we find him conjoining Northern strength 
with Southern sweetness, blending the open, vow- 
elled flow of Italy's speech with the less fluid con- 
sonantal tongue of Teutonic England. Moreover 
that Mediterranean culture, the original fountain- 
head and millenial preserver and propagator of 
European civilisation, he would know, realize in 
himself, and transmute into his own productivity. 
Of this considerable discipline of the poet, the three 
foregoing Epopees form a very significant stadium. 
They may also be regarded as showing Shake- 



THE EPICAL SHAKESPEABE 235 

speare 's early exercise in word-gymnastics ; he often 
riots in verbal expression simply for its own sweet 
sake; we may catch him caressing if not actually 
kissing his own dear vocables, or at least making 
them kiss one another in rhyme, assonance, and 
alliteration. 

Three women are found at the heart of the three 
poems, and show three attitudes toward love which 
is the central theme of each — the woman tempting, 
the woman resisting, the woman yielding. The poet 
was evidently working through in himself the sex- 
experience of his time, indeed of his race. AH 
three women are disillusioned, disappointed, un- 
happy in the outcome — a decided contrast to Shake- 
speare 's treatment of his female characters in his 
forthcoming comedies. Perhaps here we may find 
another reason why he drops his epical experiment. 

One result is certain : after this Second Epoch 
of his Apprenticeship, which coiicludes about 
1595-6, he devoted himself to the drama more in- 
tently and exclusively than ever, as if he had found 
the right vehicle of his genius. We may well seek 
in his poems, for we have no other data, to visualize 
this epochal change, or return to the theatre from 
these idyllic tales of love. A few grounds for such 
a change we may set down. ( 1 ) It is likely that he 
found that his special patron Southampton and 
probably his patronage generally preferred his 
plays, and with good reason. (2) The drama was 
native, English, not an exotic, not Italian, and had 
thus a far deeper appeal to the age and to the poet 's 



•236 ■ >'iSAKESPEA:BE>S LIFE-DBAMA. 

folk, and also to the poet himself ultimately. (3) 
Moreover he discovers that he can take up into his 
dramas the Italian element of the Renascence, mak- 
ing it a vital part of his total dramatic organism. 
Thus he renders his productivity universal, causing 
it to embrace both Northern and Southern Europe 
with their respective world-views and literatures. 
Here may be witnessed the grand coming uni- 
versality of Shakespeare, who has sought not only 
to conjoin externally but to make intergrow into 
one ideal poetic body those ever-fighting entities, 
Roma and Teutonia, who have just finished the 
bloodiest, and possibly the fatalest of their duels, 
in the so-called world-war; which duels have been 
recurring off and on for the last two thousand 
years between the same combatants. Shakespeare, 
the mediating poet, has at least ideally harmonized 
the all-devouring contradiction which seems to be 
ever yawning in the European folk-soul between 
Teutonism and Latinism. 

Now this doubleness and indeed antagonism of 
the Teutonic and the Romanic lurks deeply in Eng- 
land's spirit, being voiced primarily hy her double 
yet integrated language, which is composed of those 
two originally hostile elements usually called 
Anglo-Saxon and Latin. But this linguistic and 
spiritual dualism finds its supreme reconciliation 
realized in the speech and art of Shakespeare, 
whose book, therefore, becomes an image, and we 
may hope, a prophecy of the final peace of Europe. 
Thus our mediatorial poet prefigures not only in 



THE LYBICAL SHAKESPEABE 237 

the content of his words but in their very form and 
composition, a unified and pacified world which 
may yet conclude to talk also a unified and pacified 
speech, namely English. 

Still further, through this excursion abroad in 
distant and alien fields Shakespeare is brought to 
discern the true scope of his genius, which he now 
recognizes to lie fully in the drama. He was astray 
and in doubt for several years, but just through 
his wandering he has discovered himself and also 
his world. Often he has expressed this idea of a 
return and recovery of himself after a time of inner 
estrangement : 

If I have ranged, 
Like him that travels, I return again 
Just to the time, not with the time exchanged— 
So that myself bring water for my stain. 

Thus he celebrates his self-healing power over his 
spiritual scission and aberration, employing the 
first person, the subject, the Self in its own right 
(Sonnet 109). But this introduces us to a new 
kind of Shakespearian expression, not epical, not 
dramatic, but lyrical, of which the poet has not 
failed to furnish to us his distinctive contribution. 
Accordingly it is our next duty to take a glimpse 
of him from such a different viewpoint. 

II. 

The Lyrical Shakespeare. 

The name suggests primarily the singer with his 
lyre giving expression to his immediate feelings and 



238 SHAKESPEARE'S LIFE-DBAMA 

experiences in harmonized speech. Accordingly the 
Self or Ego of the poet becomes the center of utter- 
ance in one form or other. Thus Lyricism in its 
genesis and prime significance we stress as sub- 
jective, dealing with the manifold upbursts of the 
individual subject in joy and sorrow, in love with 
its rises and falls, in life and in death. The lyrist 
has to catch in the musical word the first gush of 
man's ever-seething emotional underworld, and 
then to sing it attuned to his instrument. This 
basic character of Lyricism will remain amid all 
its thousandfold diversities both of form and con- 
tent. For the lyrical consciousness is on the whole 
separative, particularized, atomic. 

Shakespeare as the universal poet must be also 
lyrical, weaving such a poetic strand throughout 
his entire work, as a necessary element of his 
genius. He is likewise subject, an Ego, creatively 
and colossally individualized just in his univers- 
ality. Hence we are to observe his outward epical 
narrative breaking up into little lyrical bits of in- 
ward experience. 

But before we go into the details of this phase of 
his creativity, we are to recognize that Lyricism of 
itself forms a world-historical stage in the race's 
literary evolution. Such a stage is most clearly 
manifested in antique, little, but always embryonic 
Hellas, which shows the one vast Homeric Epos 
gradually with time separating itself into number- 
less distinct lyrics whose multitudinous singers in- 
cluded both sexes, for the woman is peculiarly sub- 



TRE LYEICAL SHAKESPEARE 239 

jective, and by nature is inclined to express hersell 
lyrically. Accordingly we read of that early Greek 
songstress Corinna of Tanagra who won the lyric 
prize over greatest Pindar five times according to 
tradition. But far more enduring in fame and 
loftier in genius looms up the ancient Lesbian 
poetess Sappho, whose delicious tidbits of love- 
verse to her Phaon are still read with responsive 
thrills, being translated into all tongues, and re- 
produced with many variations around the globe 
to-day. Still it will have to be confessed that a 
man, Pindar of Thebes, remains the culmination of 
this lyrical period of Greek Literature. In his 
strains we may conceive the epical Gods of Homer, 
once speaking from high Olympus, to descend be- 
low into the terrestrial man himself and thus to 
become lyrical, singing through mortal voice their 
immortal decrees. 

But the relevant fact for us is that our Shake- 
speare, in his poetic development, rei)eats or rather 
reproduces that of Hellas, the original spiritual 
prototype of all Europe ; his individual evolution 
re-enacts the universal evolution of Poetry itself. 
No wonder that deepest instinct of his from youth 
onwards sought to imitate and thus to appropriate 
the creative process of Classic Literature as the 
very aliment of his productivity. It should here 
be added that the Grek poetic soul, like Shake- 
speare's own soul, found its complete final realisa- 
tion in the drama. 

The lyrical strand is seen weaving through 



240 SHAKESPEARE'S LIFE-DBAMA. 

Shakespeare's entire career, in various forms; it 
must have started with his boyhood at Stratford, 
it may be traced bubbling up everywhere in his 
London Pan-drama, and it could hardly have quit 
him in his last retirement at Stratford. Naturally 
during his Italian time it Italianized with all the 
rest of him ; that is, we may catch him testing upon 
his genius the lyrical forms of modern Italy, one of 
which, the Sonnet he seizes and makes his own in 
his own way forever. 

Another point may be here underscored : the 
Lyricism of Shakespeare especially in the form of 
the Sonnet, becomes the poet's autobiography 
poetically expressed. For the lyrical consciousness 
utters immediately its own subjective experiences 
as they gush up from the depths into brief jets of 
emotional and imaginative speech. Hence Shake- 
speare has written the poetical diary of his life, 
which is naturally the lyrical, the internally per- 
sonal side of his verse, as it sprays out of his experi- 
enced underworld into warm irridescent drops of 
self-expression whose content is chiefly love. 

One result of such a scattered, broken, desultory 
writ is that it can have little structural unity, such 
as we find in the Epos and in the Drama. Lyricism 
knows not the grand architectonic of poetry, and 
so rears no supreme temple of art, but remains more 
or less a pile of beautifully carved stones, at best a 
tray of diamonds. 

I. Play Lyrics. Imbedded in the dramatic 
movement are various lyrical forms which seem 



TKE LYRICAL SHAKESPEAEE 241 

spontaneously to spring out of the artistic organism 
to the surface. Especially the brief folk-songs 
throb forth a heart-felt popular note, which also 
hints the character and the situation. What can 
give a deeper glimpse into the soul of the betrayed 
Mariana (Fourth Act of Measure for Measure) 
than the one verse suddenly attuned: 

Take, take those lips away, 

That so sweetly were forsworn; 
And those eyes, the break of day. 

Lights that do mislead the morn ; 
But my kisses bring again, bring again. 

Seals of love, but seal'd in vain, seal'd 
in vain. 

Thus in a large number of Shakespeare's dramas 
lyrical strains, rhymed and sung, break unforcedly 
into the spoken blank- verse and prose. It seems as 
if the whole drama had a soul which insisted in 
certain crises of itself upon a quick musical utter- 
ance for its right relief. So we may conceive 
Shakespeare himself in his work often to start in- 
stinctively to singing out his melodious genius. 
Some people like these little lyrical jets from his 
far-down emotional underself better than any other 
part of the poet. 

Then again certain speeches in blank-verse take 
a lyrical tone and swing native to their content. 
For instance Mercutio's description of Queen Mab 
and her fabled doings seem a chanted strain of 
fantasies inserted into the action from the outside. 



242 SHAKESPE ABE'S LIFE-DRAMA 

Indeed the whole play of Romeo and Juliet shows 
an incessant struggle or rivalry between the lyrical 
and the dramatic for the poetic prize, with the re- 
sult of making them both equal victors. In this 
early tragedy we find many lines externally at- 
tuned by end-rhymes; but the best unrhymed 
passages have likewise a musical undertone croon- 
ing a soft rhythmic accompaniment. Some come- 
dies, especially the imaginative Midsummer Night's 
Dream and Tempest, are pervaded with the very 
soul of harmony which keei)S overflowing into song, 
and makes them more lyrical than dramatic. Es- 
pecially their supernatural beings, fairies and 
spirits, are endowed with a unique gift of super- 
natural word-music which we may hear best in the 
strains of Puck and Ariel. To our feeling this 
Ariel-song warbles the deepest note as well as hints 
the creative germ of the whole poem : 

Full fathom five thy father lies, 

Of his bones are coral made, 
Those are pearls that were his eyes, 

Nothing of him that doth fade, 
But doth suffer a sea-change 

Into something rich and strange. 
Sea-nymphs hourly ring his knell : 

Ding-dong — 
Hark ! now I hear them — Ding-dong, bell. 

The grand transfiguration of man 's earthly pass- 
ing into his eternal portion is here voiced in words 
that sing their own tune as it were from above. 



THE LTEICAL SnAKESFEAUE 243 

And the thrilled reader fails not to think of the 
poet himself, the magical transfigurer who has 
overmade his own fading life and world into a 
fadeless "something rich and strange" which we 
still contemplate. In this little song, probably one 
of his last, singing out of his last play, the lyrical 
Shakespeare reaches his highest point, and hymns 
a glimpse from the top of his Pisgah across the 
border into his future fulfilment. 

Besides these songs other lyrical forms can be 
dug out of the rich soil of Shakespeare's dramas — 
such as the ballad, the epigram, the proverb, even 
the jingling doggerel. But of such fitful, mostly 
fragmentary ripples of his Lyricism we can here 
take no account. 

II. Miscellaneous Poems. Shakespeare has 
left us a few separate bits of verse which may in 
general bo classed as his poetic miscellanies, in con- 
trast with the foregoing lyrics intergrown with his 
dramas, and hardly separable from their context 
without some violence. Under this head we may 
begin with a small collection of poems which bears 
the title of The Passionate Pilgrim, mostly though 
not wholly composed of little whiffs of that well- 
known i^assion called love, twenty one of them (in 
my edition), not very ardent or deep or prolonged. 
The book was first published in 1599, with the 
name of W. Shakespeare as author on the title- 
page, but it contains pieces by other poets. Indeed 
the best thing in the collection is by Marlowe, be- 
ginning "Love with me and be my love" — an ex- 



244 SHAKESPE ABE'S LIFE-DBAMA 

quisite lyric which keeps the name of Marlowe 
])opularly alive and known to-day more than do 
all his dramas, being found in every good anthol- 
ogy. A scrappy book of poetry of diverse quality, 
content, form and authorship is this PassioTiate 
Pilgrim: who put it together, and how did that old 
printer get it? A question insoluble now, though 
provocative of much erudition and speculation as 
well as of some editorial hebetude. 

So much, however, we know: several of Shake- 
speare's own sonnets are inserted here, for they 
are found also in his other works. But the most 
interesting Shakespearian fact in the whole scrap- 
book is that four pieces (Nos. 4, 6, 9, 11,) in sonnet 
form take up and work over phases of the fable of 
Venus and Adonis after a somewhat tentative 
fashion, as if the young author might be testing 
himself on his material. The most natural con- 
clusion (as Malone long ago suggested) is that 
these four sonnets are preliminary studies for the 
poet's Venus and Adonis, and might have been al- 
ready conceived if not made at Stratford, since 
of the scenery and experiences of his home-town 
Venus and Adonis is everywhere redolent. If this 
be so, Shakespeare took an early start at sonneting, 
in fact some years before he went to Italy, for 
which it was a kind of overturing incentive and 
preparation. 

It should be added that the foregoing views run 
counter to the general trend of criticism upon this 
curious little Shakespearian scrapbook. Some 



THE LYRICAL SnAKE.SPEABE 245 

writers deny Shakespeare's authorship of these 
four sonnets altogether, others assign to him a part 
of them — and so on. Swinburne with his accus- 
tomed dogmatic violence damns the whole work as 
"a rag-picker's bag of stolen goods", angrily 
shouting that the thing is purely a bookseller's 
piracy after the fact, and hence can contain no 
preparatory sketches of the self-testing young poet. 
For our part, we think we find still other indica- 
tions, though more veiled, that The Passionate Pil- 
grim was a kind of publishing outlet for Shake- 
speare's early experiments in verse, when their 
climacteric had passed off in 1599, and when he 
could look back at a stage of his transcended Self. 
Besides the four mentioned sonnets, which deal by 
name with the subject of Venus and Adonis, we 
count five short poems employing the same form 
and meter which distinguishes that poem — namely 
its rhymed pentametral six-lined stanza, along with 
its general literary tone. Let the reader peruse to- 
gether these five brief snatches of rhyme (Nos. 7, 
10, 13, 14, 15,) — he will often be reminded of the 
style and mood of Venus and Adonis. Hence these 
five rather broken shapes of versicles we would 
construe as paralipomena to the poet 's larger work, 
being excluded probably for the sake of a closer 
unity and harmony. In fact a careful scrutiny will 
suggest the reason why the poet in his final revision 
resolved to cut out such inconsistent if not refrac- 
tory passages. Of course these five pieces have been 
taken away wholly or in part from Shakespeare by 



246 SHAKESPEARE'S LIFE-DBAMA. 

the critic, who has never yet seen their true poetic 
place in the poet's total evolution. For instance 
our big brother biographer, Sir Sidney Lee, 
learnedly but rather blindly suggests that ''they 
are from Barnfield's pen", an obscure weak goose- 
quill of that Elizabethan time. (As to the fact of 
liaralipomena or well-composed verses left out or 
excided by a great poet in fnial revision, let the in- 
quisitive reader compare those of Goethe's Faust. 
These have also been translated by Bayard Taylor. 
Note too that such scattered omissions were after- 
wards collected and printed in the doubtless paral- 
lel case of Goethe.) 

Another very unique poem which we place under 
the head of these Shakespearian miscellanies, is 
that baffling fantasia called The Phoenix and the 
Turtle with thirteen rhymed stanzas of four lines 
each, followed by the Threnos or funereal song 
with five stanzas of three rhymed lines each. Thus 
the poem, though of two distinct parts, is of short 
compass, but solitary in its species among the works 
of Shakespeare, who, however, can be detected sing- 
ing kindred strains under other metered disguises, 
especially in his Sonnets. 

This poem was first printed in a new sample of 
poetical scrapbook (evidently a fashion of the time) 
which is dated 1601, hence two years after the pre- 
ceding miscellany. The title runs in part : "Love's 
Martyr or Rosaline's Complaint, allegorically 
shadowing the truth of love, in the constant fate of 
The Phoenix and the Turtle", with other here 



THE LTEICAL SHAKESPEAEE 247 

omissible tags of information. The collection is 
made up of "diverse poetical essays", nameless and 
named, one of which is the above poem subscribed 
with the name of William Shakespeare. Such is 
the external evidence of its authenticity, which in 
general has been accepted, though sometimes chal- 
lenged on grounds more or less subjective. 

Concerning this to our mind prophetic poem, 
The Phoenix and the Turtle, we may first jot down 
what to us stands out as its most peculiar and 
stunning characteristic : Shakespeare writes here 
an Emersonian lyric more than two centuries before 
the birth of Emerson, whose turn of thought and 
use of the English word often recall the Eliza- 
bethan stylists. For example those two birds, the 
one fabled and the other real, the Phoenix and the 
Turtle, 

lov'd, as love in twain 

Had the essence but in one; 

Two distincts, division none: — 

Hearts remote, yet not asunder ; 

Distance, and no space was seen — . 

So Shakespeare had his transcendental mood, or 
perchance epoch in Old England without waiting 
for New England whose Concord poet sings a con- 
cordant strain in his Brahma : 

Far or forgot to me is near, 

Shadow and sunlight are the same. 

The vanished gods to me appear, 
And one to me are shame and fame. 



248 SSAKESPf: ARE'S LIFE-DBAMA. 

They reckon ill who leave me out, 

When me they fly, I am the wings; 
I am the doubter and the doubt — . 

Thus the dualism of the whole finite world vanishes 
like the Hindoo Maya into the absolute One. 
Shakespeare has the same movement, but corLfines 
it to love: he makes the two lovers (as birds) lose 
their twoness in the one essence of love by death, 
and he spins in the process some of his finest meta- 
physical gossamers, hardly visible unless seen across 
the sunlight from the heights: 

Single nature's double name 
Neither two nor one was call'd — 
Reason, in itself confounded, 
Saw division grow together; 
To themselves yet either neither. 
Simple were so well compounded — . 

Here the term reason seems to mean the Kantian 
understanding, and the passage calls up one of the 
deepest-searching discussions sprung of modern 
German Philosophy, which may be stated very 
simply thus : what is the difference between Reason 
(Vernuft) and Understanding (Verstand) ? We 
can find Emerson wrestling with the same problem, 
which probably came to him from the Germans 
through Carlyle. Goethe also had his repeated 
tussle with the same subtle distinction, in spite of 
his professed dislike of philosophy. 

Since the original title states the purjjort of the 



THE LTBICAL SHAKESPEASE 249 

book as ' ' allegorieally shadowing the truth of love ' ' 
in the fate of the two birds, not a few commenta- 
tors have been enticed to explain the seeminglj^ 
confessed allegory. Grosart, for instance, main- 
tains that it shadows the love of Queen Elizabeth 
(celebrated by her jjoets as the virginal Phoenix) 
for the Earl of Essex, who was her turtle-dove. 
But such a theory breaks down at essential joints. 
Shakespeare's poem through all its gauzy cloud- 
land lets us see distinctly the tragedy of love in 
both male and female, which he had already set 
forth on the stage to the senses in Romeo and 
Juliet, who also like the two birds may be taken as 
' ' co-supremes and stars of love." Moreover this 
book bears the date of 1601, which is about the 
time when Shakespeare enters upon his topmost 
Tragic Period, during which he writes his great 
tragedies, starting probably with his early Hamlet, 
as seen in its first Quarto. This deeply brooded 
bird-fantasia may well indicate his melancholy 
presentiment of what is in store for him, as well as 
mirror his pensive reminiscence of the "pair of 
star-crossed lovers" Romeo and Juliet, verily his 
youthful tragedy of the Turtle and the Phoenix, 
for 

Death is now the Phoenix' nest. 

And the Turtle's loyal breast 

To eternity doth rest. 

Leaving no posterity, 

'Twas not their infirmity, 

It was marred chastity. 



250 SHAKESPEARE'S LIFE-DBAMA. 

Similar far-flung idealisms, demanding the 
keenest mentality of the reader, we find strown 
through the poet's Sonnets, seemingly at random, 
for example in Sonnet 105 : 

Kind is my love to-day, to-morrow kind, 
Still constant in a wondrous excellence; 
Therefore my verse to constancy confin'd, 
One thing expressing, leaves out difference. 

Here again he gives us a glimpse of that ' ' constant 
love" which is above all difference and which, he 
says, is the theme of his verse. 

Fair, kind, and true, is all my argument. 
Fair, kind, and true, varying to other words. 
And in this change is my invention spent, 
Three themes in one, which wondrous scope 
affords. 

In these lines the poet starts to Platonizing as he 
often does in the Sonnets, which are shot through 
with Plato's famous trinity: the True, the Beauti- 
ful, and the Good. At this point we also come 
upon the main subject of the Threnos whose first 
verse wails thus : 

Beauty, Truth and Rarity, 
Here inclos'd in cinders lie. 

Such is Shakespeare's tragedy of the Phoenix and 
the Turtle, wondrously transcendental. (If the 
reader is jarred by that third vocable Rarity, as I 
am, let him substitute for it Purity, or even Char- 



TBE LYBICAL SWAKESPEAEE 251 

ity, which may well stand for kind or good). 

The Arabian Phoenix is a many-cent uried fable, 
reaching back to old Herodotus, and floating down 
the ages in hundreds of allusions and poems. It 
was a favorite with Shakesj)eare ; lie probably first 
became acquainted with it in his classical school at 
Stratford. At any rate he employs it in his earliest 
drama, Henry VI, Part I. (Act IV. sc. 7) 

But from their ashes shall be rear'd 

A Phoenix that shall make all Prance afeard. 

And in his last drama, The Tempest (Act III, sc. 3) 
he gives to the wonderful story a fuller and finor 
turn: 

Now I will believe 
That there are unicorns ; that in Arabia 
There is one tree, the Phoenix' throne; one 

Phoenix 
At this hour reigning there. 

Somewhere about midway between these his two 
extreme productions may be timed the preceding 
mystical notes of the Phoenix and the Turtle, as 
if chanting out of the poet's heart -depths a back- 
look and a forelock over his entire London Pan- 
drama. The theme is the unity of two souls in one 
all-consuming love, which has often been sung in 
very diverse modes, whereof we may cite these 
two deep-toned throbs from a German lyrist : 

Zwei Seelen und ein Gedanke, 
Zwei Herzen und ein Schlag. 



252 SHAKESPEARE'S LIFE-DRAMA. 

It is a noteworthy fact that the poetic transcen- 
dentalist, Ralph Waldo Emerson selected just this 
most transcendental poem of Shakespeare for his in- 
terpretation as well as for his warm approval. Says 
he, in the preface to his Anthology (Parnassus 
1875) : "It would appear to be a lament on the 
death of a poet and of his poetic mistress. But the 
poem is so quaint, and charming in diction, tone, 
and allusions, and in its perfect meter and har- 
mony, that I would gladly have the fullest illustra- 
tion yet attainable. I consider this piece a good ex- 
ample of the rule that there is a poetry for bards 
proper as well as a poetry for the world of read- 
ers." Thus Emerson seems to be letting out some 
heart-words in regard to his own peculiar poetry, 
and with stronger emphasis he clinches his last 
])oint: "This i)oem, if published for the first time 
and without a known author's name, would find no 
general reception. Only the poets would save it." 
Moreover Emerson in the same enthusiastic para- 
graph proposes that there should be offered "a 
IDrize for an essay on Shakespeare 's i)oem ' ', dealing 
with its historical, literary, and spiritual interpre- 
tation. Possibly such an essay lurks still some- 
where in the unpublished Emersonian archives. 

Thus our American Emerson, having originally 
set up his own Sphinx at the portal of his poetic 
temple (see his Poems, first edition) here glorifies 
Shakespeare's riddling Sphinx, modestly couching 
in the heart or at least in the middle of the latter 's 
full-flowing dramatic career. One thinks that 



TBE LYRICAL SHAKESPEABE 253 

Emerson in his soul's secret preference must have 
regarded The Phoenix and the Turtle as the best 
thing in all Shakespeare, though he does not say 
so. At any rate we catch out of it a strain in the 
total Shakespearian psychology usually neglected, 
indeed usually unintelligible, namely, the poet's 
supersensuous, idealistic, transcendental vein which 
forms such a world-wide contrast with his vivid 
sensuous presentations on the stage. The same 
conclusion whispers us in an undertone out of 
Emerson's essay on Shakespeare in his Representa- 
tive Men, which, however, contains one of the 
briefly best, most prophetic, most creative sentences 
ever written on the bard of Avon: "Shakespeare 
is the only biographer of Shakespeare. ' ' 

III. The Sonnets. Here we reach decidedly 
the poetic culmination of the lyrical Shakespeare, 
who is now seen far surpassing, in literary power 
and intense self-expression, his epical work, and 
even rivaling his dramatic genius on certain lines. 
More deeply lyrical are these Sonnets than any 
other phase of his lyricism ; they reveal the poet 's 
subjectivity in all its waywardness and steadfast- 
ness, in its great littleness and in its little great- 
ness, mirroring his individuality's microcosm as 
well as his universality's macrocosm. 

Accordingly the reader will do well to note at 
the start that the Shakespearian I or Ego is the 
center from which radiate all these little flashes of 
poems. The hero of this sonneted Odyssey of the 
poet's inner life is himself, or rather his Self, 



254 SHAKESPE ABE'S LIFE-DBAMA 

chanting his own soul 's wanderings, as he composes 
his London Pan-drama, the greatest book of World- 
Literature. Thus we catch in the total sweep of 
these 154 singing atoms a subtle heroic tinge, some- 
what Ulyssean, though the adventures over these 
stormy seas and sunny islets be wholly internal 
and lyrical. We hear the poet reproaching himself 
for this one-sided occupation with his own Ego, 
which he brands as ''the sin of self-love" when he 
is at his spirit's contrite confessional, where we 
often find him in these Sonnets. Take for example 
number 62: 

Sin of self-love possesseth all mine eye, 
And all my soul and all my every part ; 
And for this sin there is no remedy, 
It is so grounded inward in my heart. 
■ Methinks no face so gracious is as mine. 
No shape so true, no truth of such account, 
And for myself mine own worth do define, 
As I all other in all worths surmount. 

Here is certainly a huge ground-swell of self -ap- 
preciation on the part of William Shakespeare, 
quite equal to the world-embracing enthusiasm over 
him in these days of ours. This grandiose Ego of 
the poet will "define its own worth for itself", 
and declares itself to ''surmount all other (poets, 
men) in all worths." Who, after such an upburst 
of self-recognition can repeat the commonplace un- 
truth that Shakespeare never knew his own great- 



THE LTBICAL SHAEESPEABE 255 

ness? Still he fails not to give himself the coun- 
terstroke of age in the same Sonnet : 

But when my glass shows me myself indeed, 
Beaten and chopp'd with tann'd antiquity, 
Mine own self-love quite contrary I read; 
Self so self -loving were iniquity. 

This is quite another Self from that first one, now 
old, ugly, unlovely, which he beholds in his glass 
outer and inner — -his Ego being by nature thus 
self -seeing, indeed doubly self -seeing. But this is 
not the end of the subtle psychology of the present 
Sonnet, since a new person or at least a new per- 
sonal pronoun enters the process, namely "thee 
I myself praise for myself", whereupon follows a 
fresh higher uplift. Or, to cite the two final subtly 
worded and even more subtly thoughted lines: 

'Tis thee (myself) that for myself I praise, 
Painting my age with beauty of thy days. 

Who or what is this marvelous thee that has the 
magic power of transmuting ''my age" old and 
ugly, as it is, into ' ' the beauty of thy days ' ' in the 
poet's song of praise? 

The question calls up one of the central difficul- 
ties in the interpretation of the Sonnets. To 
identify the foregoing thee with some man or 
woman or thing or idea has been the main business 
of the army of expositors. Somehow a noun, 
proper or common, has to be found for that pro- 
noun, else the commentator must shut his shop. 



256 SB ARE SPE AIRE'S LIFE-DBAMA 

Leaving aside such a pursuit at present, which is 
likely again to prove fruitless, as it has a hundred 
times already, we may observe in the preceding 
Sonnet three psychical stages of the poet's inner 
experience or of his Ego: (1) excessive self-sat- 
isfaction, (2) excessive self -dissatisfaction, (3) 
self -restoration through ' ' painting my age with thy 
beauty" — evidently his own poetic act, which thus 
keeps rejuvenating the old poet. 

Having such an example before us, we may next 
proceed to state a determining characteristic which 
runs through this entire collection of Sonnets. 
Under a variety of pronouns (I, thou, he, she, it, 
and their derivatives) Shakespeare hides the names 
of the persons addressed or involved ; he refuses to 
betray individuals under their own designation. I 
believe he did so on purpose; he would compel us 
to look away from the particular person to what is 
generically true. Significantly lie employs no 
proper nouns, but only their pronouns, signs uni- 
versal for the special appellatives. Even his own 
identity he couches in the one letter I, using a few 
times one little bit of his cognomen. Will, which, 
however, he shadows darkly with its ambiguous 
pun. Evidently he wishes no personal identifica- 
tion ; he writes these brief musings to be read by his 
private friends (like Francis Meres) as his heart's 
confidences about himself, his vocation, his conflicts, 
outer and inner, and most deeply his world-view, 
for we shall often find him here philosophizing in 
thought's profoundest vein, and taldng his woe's 



THE LYRICAL SHAKESPEABE 257 

own medicine: "Adversity's sweet milk, Phi- 
losophy. ' ' 

Hence from this point of view we may charac- 
terize these Sonnets as pronominal, emphasizing 
the pronoun instead of the noun, substituting the 
general for the special. Such is the one chief dis- 
guise or poetic subterfuge — the pronoun masks the 
noun. Mark the contrast with the named person- 
ages of his dramas, perhaps a thousand titles down 
to the little page, and sometimes voiceless in a 
dumb-show. What bearing has this fact upon the 
desperate modern attempt to re-name (or re-noun) 
the poet's pronouns, calling them Southampton, 
Pembroke, and many other appellations concrete 
and abstract? Such seems to be the coming ques- 
tion in this matter. 

One name, however, will insist upon rising, 
though never articulated throughout the whole 
course of these Sonnets: Marlowe. Often the 
reference to him is decided, often barely percept- 
ible. But Shakespeare never did or could throw off 
the influence of that Promethean genius who shaped 
him at the formative beginning of his career. Cne 
may frequently hear the poet paying unconscious 
tribute to his early master rather than to his sup- 
posed noble patrons. A woman also has woven 
herself organically into the living tissue of these 
poems, the so-called Dark Lady. Her identifica- 
tion has not been fully proved, nor by any means 
disproved; so she hovers dimly but daringly, and 
will continue to hover as the shadowy Mary Fitton, 



258 SHAKESPEAEE'S LIFE-DEAMA 

Shakespeare's real Cleo])atra playing her part in 
his inner Life-drama. 

Another much-discussed problem in reference to 
these Sonnets is the date of their composition. Let 
us at once state our view : they are the poet 's inti- 
mate diary for some twenty years or more— from 
his start with Marlowe (possibly a couple of them 
may reach back to Stratford) till their publication 
in 1609. Hence beneath all of Shakespeare's 
Periods underlie the Sonnets, and even his Epochs 
we can discern in their mirror reflecting the stages 
of his whole poetic evolution. To be sure, in this 
central stream is mingled much material more or 
less foreign, which perturbs and deflects the read- 
er's mind. Still the autobiographic undertow is 
felt in it everywhere, and is to be brought to the 
surface. 

Shakespeare's form of the Sonnet is an adapta- 
tion from the Italian, which, though he did not 
originate it, he brought to its acme. Doubtless the 
most prolific tine of his sonneting was his Italian- 
izing Epoch already described. As far as known, 
Marlowe would not take to the Sonnet, and hence 
did not follow Shakespeare on this line. The small 
atomic quatorzain (as it is technically called) Mar- 
lowe the Titan seemingly disdained as too petty 
and too crushed for the huge outreach of his genius. 
Shakespeare on the contrary loved it, developed it, 
and caressed it as the dear momentary relief of his 
tumultuous, ever-passioning heart-world. 

In the dedication of the edition of 1609 occur 



TEE LYRICAL SHAKESPEABE 259 

these words : "To the only begetter of the ensuing 
Sonnets, Mr. W. H. " This little phrase has turnea 
out a huge nest of riddles, on which the guessers 
are still busily at work. Who is this Mr. W. H. ? 
These two simple initials, hande i down to posterity 
by publisher Thomas Thorpe, have been as prolific 
of conjecture as Shakespeare's own masquerade of 
pronouns all through the mazy dance of the Son- 
nets. More than a dozen candidates for this emptied 
name W. H. have been suggested with much dis- 
play of leaxning and ingenuity, which up- to date 
seems about the only result. Then that oracular 
locution, ''the only begetter", is capable of at least 
three different meanings in Elizabethan English, 
each of which finds hot upholders. Our not very 
ardent view is that ''the begetter" here means not 
the getter merely, nor yet the outside inspirer, but 
the actual creator, who is rightly "the only be- 
getter ' ' of these poems. And into this maelstrom of 
whirling guesses we would fling our own little sur- 
mise, already pre-empted by some Shakespearians, 
that W. H. is an uncorrected misprint for W. S., 
namely William Shakespeare, who in the title of the 
book is practically declared to be its only true be- 
getter. Thus the whole trouble has been caused by 
the printer who otherwise has shown himself very 
fallible throughout the text of this edition, which 
also seems to have been ushered into the world 
quite proof -readerless. But enough of these in- 
finitesimal side-issues. 

That which for us remains the quintessential 



260 SHAKESPE ABE'S LIFE-DBAMA 

fact of this diary of Sonnet-gushes is that it images 
in the inner life of the poet the three supreme 
Periods of his evolution. They show him in his 
younger buoyant years, in his middle-aged tragic 
intensity, and in his final turn to a repentant spirit 
along with its reconciliation inner and outer. All 
three leading stages of Shakespeare's personal de- 
velopment can be traced in these poetically con- 
centrated outpourings of his heart and head. Only 
through intense and prolonged communings with 
these intimate confessions of himself to himself, 
can we hope to be admitted to the real presence of 
the man. For these Sonnets, as they stand num- 
bered in print, form by no means a consecutive 
well-ordered whole ; though we may detect some 
regular sequences, shorter and longer, as a mass 
they reveal no general principle of arrangement, 
except the diarial. Moreover it belongs to such a 
moody, motleyed, scattered journal, that it contains 
many jottings at random. 

Still within and through all this heterogeneous 
medley are reflected the capital nodes of the poet's 
life, which are seen also in his dramas. Accord- 
ingly we shall cite a few passages from the Sonnets 
illustrating the three already described Periods of 
his London Pan-drama. 

I. There is little doubt that the larger portion 
of Shakespeare's Sonnets were written during the 
Period which we have called his Apprenticeship — 
on the whole his happy, hopeful, buoyant years 
antedating his great tragedies. This was likewise 



THE LYEICAL SEAKESPEABE 261 

the time of his most diversified and prolific author- 
ship. Frequently his earlier dramas take a turn 
to the Sonnet especially during his Italianizing 
mood; in fact Love's Labor's Lost shows a kind of 
contest for the mastery between the Drama and the 
Sonnet. As an illustration of his present happy 
atunement and exalted self-appreciation, we may 
cite the following example (No. 55.) 

Not marble nor the gilded monuments 
Of princes shall outlive this powerful rhyme ; 
But you shall shine more bright in these contents 
Than unswept stone, besmear 'd with sluttish time 
When wasteful war shall statues overturn, 
And broils root out the work of masonry, 
Nor Mars his sword, nor war's quick fire shall 

burn 
The living record of your memory. 
'Gainst death and all-oblivious enmity 
Shall you pace forth: your praise shall still find 

room, 
Even in the eyes of all posterity 
That wear this world out to the ending doom. 

But here again the pronominal problem rises: 
Who, what is this youf Instead of such a disguis- 
ing substitute, let us have his, her or its noun 
which somehow is hidden in or under that pro- 
noun, so demands the prying commentator. But 
in whatever way one may shape the answer, the 
poet has abundantly told on himself, has given 
clearest utterance to his faith in his own genius, 



262 SHAKESPEAEE'S LIFE-DBAMA 

which after all may be just the entity addressed 
here, inspiring "the living record of your mem- 
ory". At any rate, there is one wholly undis- 
guised, very positive statement : the poet 's exalted 
affirmation of his own poetic immortality, defying 
"death and all-oblivious enmity." 

II. Undoubtedly during this buoyant time he 
has his spasms of melancholy when he sees dark, 
though he recovers. But there is in these Sonnets 
a persistently tragic group, though not always 
clustered together in successive numbers. To the 
vanishing side of existence we hear him give full 
stress; especially does he celebrate the negative 
might of Time as the all-devouring deity like old 
Greek Cronus: 

Ruin hath taught me thus to ruminate. 
That Time will come and take my love away; 
This thought is as a death, which cannot choose 
But weep to have that which it fears to lose. 

Here mournfully we are attuned to a tragic se- 
quence of Ruin, Time, Death — a right gloomy set 
for the poet's meditation (No. 64.) 

It has often been remarked that one of these 
Sonnets (No. 66) is an emphatic echo of the Ham- 
let tragedy, especially of its central utterance, the 
soliloquy on Death. The opening line strikes the 
tragic tone of the poet 's Second Period : 

Tir'd with all these, for restful Death I cry, 

whereupon he recounts with pessimistic bitterness 



THE LTBICAL SHAKESPEABE 263 

the time's hopeless degeneracy, so that we can hear 
the poet intoning the psychical parallel : 

To be or not to be, that is the question. 

Thus the present Sonnet offers a date, if not exactly 
one of time, at least one of spirit, for the poet's 
inner response to his Tragic Period. Into what 
deepest depths he must have sunk while writing 
his Tragedies, we are made to feel when we read 
the following (No. 71) 

No longer mourn for me when I am dead 
Than you shall hear the sullen surly bell 
Give warning to the world that I am fled 
From this vile world with vilest worms to dwell. 
0, if, I say, you look upon this verse 
When I perhaps compounded am with clay, 
Do not so much as my poor name rehearse. 
But let your love even with my life decay. 

Such is now the note of the poet's mortality in 
deepest contrast to the note of the poet's immo»-- 
tality heard in the Sonnet previously cited (No. 
55). But with the years, some seven or eight of 
them as we make the tally, this world-destroying 
tragic mood will finally get relief through Shake- 
speare's mightiest self-expression, and a calmer 
strain of reconciliation will begin to be heard in 
certain Sonnets, which change undoubtedly springs 
from another nodal experience of his life. 

III. Accordingly we are now to catch a new 
music of return and restoration to fresh hope and 



264 SHAKESPE ABE'S LIFE-DBAMA 

faith in himself, as well as to a revival of his youth- 
ful poetic ambition and of his lofty self-appreeia- 
tion. He has been in eclipse; behold him coming 
out of it (No. 107) : 

The mortal moon hath her eclipse endur'd 
And the sad augurs moek their own presage; 
Incertainties now crown themselves assur'd, 
And peace proclaims olives of endles sage. 
Now, with the drops of this most balmy time 
My love looks fresh, and death to me subscribes, 
Since, spite of him, I'll live in this poor rhyme, 
While he insults o'er dull and speechless tribes: 
And thou in this shalt find thy monument. 
When tyrants' crests and tombs of brass are 
spent. 

A vast amount of local and cotemporary history 
has been crushed into this Sonnet, with great in- 
crease of its "incertainties." And that uncertain 
ever-shifting pronoun thou again appears with its 
marvelous polymorphism. Still there is one unfail- 
ing certainty uttered here : it is the poet 's own re- 
stored and reconciled mood in thought, style, and 
theme. There may have been an external historic 
peace, or an external physical eclipse of the moon 
alluded to above — who knows? But the fact of 
Shakespeare's own return of peace, and of the 
passing of his eclipse is throbbed from every word. 
And that must have been his main object, namely 
his self-expression as the last need of his being. 
Moreover let us mark that Death no longer tri- 



THE LTBICAL SHAKESPEABE 265 

umphs over him, as in the foregoing tragic time, 
but now "subscribes (submits) to me", who am 
therefore his conqueror. Such is the deepest note 
of the Third Period not only in the poet 's dramas, 
but likewise in the poet himself, who utters his 
soul's triumphant deliverance in that pivotal Son- 
net (No. 146) when he says: 

So shalt thou feed on Death that feeds on men, 
And Death once dead, there's no more dying 
then. 

We may take these two lines as the reconciled out- 
come and redemptive finale of the poet's Sonnets, 
of his Dramas, and of his life. More subtly turned 
in thought and phrase, it recalls a like-minded but 
more emotionalized and higher-pitched passage in 
another more authoritative book : " Death, where 
is thy sting ! Grave where is thy victory ! ' ' 

What may be called the psychology of the Son- 
nets remains to be written. Their reader is already 
inclined to turn away from the fruitless search and 
re-search after the identification of their darkly 
veiled pronouns and of the dubious initials (Mr. 
W. H. ) . But there is one personality of whom some 
attribute or mood is recounted in nearly every 
Sonnet: this is I, Ego, Self, Shakespeare, who is 
here at his confessional telling his joys and sorrows, 
his sins of omission and commission, with contri- 
tion, repentance, and absolution through his self- 
expression. In his Sonnets, then, we have his dis- 
tinctive psychological record of himself by himself, 



266 SEAKESPE ABE'S LIFE-DBAMA. 

of course in concretely poetic, not in abstractly 
scientific form. 

Finally we are to note that in these separate bits 
of poems lurks a drama, indeed several acts or 
stages of a many-tentacled drama, which here re- 
mains as it were implicit, conceived but not yet 
born into dramatic utterance and structure. The 
poet or his / (Ego) is the central character, round 
whom play his man and his woman, his dear male 
friend on the one side, and on the other his dearer 
fascinating conqueress known as the Dark Lady. 
But of this ever-budding yet never-flowering dra- 
matic embryo in the Sonnets we can here give no 
account, though of much value and interest; the 
Shakespearian drama as unfolded and realized in 
this Second Epoch rises now before us, to which we 
must next pass. 

III. 

The Dramatic Shakespeare. 

As already recorded, Shakespeare has harvested 
one considerable dramatic experience, which we 
have set forth as his Collaborative Epoch, the time 
of his four (or possibly six) so-called but not well- 
called Yorkian plays, which embrace all of his 
Henry VI and his Richard III. But now we again 
take up his dramaturgy, as it shows itself during 
this Second Epoch when he expands from the one 
concentrated point in many directions, imitating, 
experimenting, appropriating. In this time of out- 



THE DRAMATIC SHAKEMFEAEE 267 

reaching aspiration, having traced his epical and 
lyrical strands, we shall next follow his dramatic 
development, which runs quite parallel to the two 
mentioned lines throughout the present Epoch. 

Now his dramas as a whole during this time will 
show the same diversified, searchful, imitative char- 
acter, which lias been already emphasized. That is, 
as his yearning sought an universal poetic culture, 
embracing the three grand divisions of all poetry, 
epical, lyrical, and dramatic, so now the third one 
of these divisions, the drama, he will essay in its 
three leading transmitted forms, which were known 
to him as Comedy, History, Tragedy. (The reader 
can see these three divisions boldly capitalized, as 
if from the mind if not from the hand of the author 
himself, in the Table of Contents to the First 
Folio; also they are mentioned in Hamlet). 

So it comes that into this Ei)Ocli of about six 
years we intend to place seven early Shakespearian 
dramas, not now collaborated but independent, 
stamped with the poet's individual genius, yet 
bearing decided marks of the aforetime which his 
evolution has just passed through. Of course there 
always has been and still is a question about the 
dates of these plays singly taken; into such a dis- 
cussion, however, we shall very sparingly enter. 
But there is a pretty fair agreement even among 
the special date-excavators that the said seven 
dramas fall somewhere within the sexennial Epoch 
1589-1595 — which time-limits are sufficiently exact 
for our present survey. 



268 SHAKESPEARE'^ LIFE-DRAMA 

Still there is one important chronological line 
which we shall draw through these seven dramas, 
dividing them into those written before and those 
written after the poet's Italian experience. Some- 
where about the middle of this Epoch (1592-3), 
Shakespeare made his visit to Italy, and the imme- 
diate impress of that land of art and literature can 
be felt and seen in the works composed under its 
spell. Already we have traced the distinctive 
Italian influence in the epical and in the lyrical 
Shakes^jeare ; but now we are to mark even more 
decisively in the dramatic Shakespeare the import 
of renascent Italy which he saw still in its realized 
glory, though this was declining toward sunset. It 
is not too much to say that the Italian Renascence 
had through Shakespeare a unique Northern re- 
birth, which still helps to keep it present and active 
in the soul of the ages. He made it an integral 
part of himself forever, nestling it in the very heart 
of his creative energy, as we see even in his latest 
plays. 

Accordingly we shall find the poet variously test- 
ing his powers first in three pre-Italian dramas, one 
comedy (Errors), one tragedy (Titus Andronicus), 
and one history (King John). Later we shall ob- 
serve him under the Italian enchantment producing 
still in this Epoch four dramas — one tragedy 
(Romeo and Juliet), one history (Richard II), and 
at least two comedies (The Two Gentlemen of 
Verona) and (Love's Labor's Lost). Thus we note 
him essaying every species of drama to discover the 



TEE DRAMATIC SllAKESFEAEE 269 

true orbit of his genius — his peculiar business dur- 
ing the present Epoch. Moreover we catch him 
trying and appropriating the chief transmitted 
dramatic norms of the historic past — old Roman, 
renascent Italian, modern English. 

It is, therefore, our task now' to watch the su- 
preme dramatic genius practising and mastering 
the three main kinds of drama — Tragedy, History, 
and Comedy — of each of which he produces a pre- 
Italian and an Italian or Italianized example. 
Mark well, he is still acquiring and perfecting his 
vocation, whose final goal is his completely fulfilled 
self-expression, his poetic self-realisation. 

I. Tragedies of the Present Epoch. As al- 
ready indicated, we place under the foregoing head 
the pre-Italian Titus Andronicus and the deeply 
Italianized Romeo and Juliet, since the contrast 
between them in regard to the point we are empha- 
sizing, is most manifest and coercive. The one is 
old Roman (Senecan) in subject, style, characters 
and cruelties, seemingly a good deal of a reminder 
of the youth's classical studies at Stratford, inter- 
larded as it is with Latin quotation and allusion. 
But the second tragedy is the very bloom and fra- 
grance of modern fresh-flowering Italy, which 
Shakespeare must have smelt, seen, and assimilated, 
so we think, from the soil itself. For there is a 
vast difference between the two dramas, not only in 
the outer environment, but in the very soul ; what 
is the cause? A great new personal experience of 
the poet we say — namely the immediately sensed 



270 SHAKESPE ABE'S LIFE-DBAMA 

and assimilated Italy. Then the first drama is by 
far a more remote, external imitation than the sec- 
ond, which, however, with all its telling originality, 
is still a derivative. 

It should be added that both these plays are 
listed as Tragedies in the First Folio, the best and 
most authentic voucher there is for the author's 
own classification of the Shakespearian Pan-drama. 
And the following fact also would seem to have its 
meaning: in that same First Folio both are placed 
together, side by side; that is, Titus Andronicus 
stands just before Romeo and Juliet, as if the twain 
might have been coupled together in the poet's 
mind when he looked back upon his work from his 
retreat at Stratford. Perhaps only an accident; 
still an accident sometimes lias its pointer. At any 
rate we intend to follow the First Folio in putting 
the two together in their likeness and unlikeness, 
as deeply illustrative of Shakespeare's growth dur- 
ing this Epoch. 

TITUS ANDRONICUS. 

"O, horrible, horrible, most horrible!" Such 
is the shivering shriek sent up at the m.ention of 
this play from nearly the entire host of English 
commentators, echoed of course by our American 
parrots, till the scream of horror belts the globe 
along with the name of William Shakespeare him- 
self. In subserviency to this fearsome far-flung 
vociferation, the present drama has been very gen- 



TITUS ANDEONICUS 271 

erally dammed as not of Shakespeare at all, some- 
times with a good deal of esthetic unction. Cries 
Henry Hallam, the much-lauded judicially minded 
critic and historian, res ipsa vociferatur against 
the authenticity of this work. But we have to think 
that Hallam himself is the real vociferator along 
with his horrified horde of fellow-shriekers, start- 
ing very faintly from old Ravenscrof t 's dubious 
whisperings more than two centuries ago, but long 
after the poet 's demise. 

And now let it be fully acknowledged and em- 
phasized that Titus Andronicus reeks with horribil- 
ities curiously diversified, but never lacking in 
carnage and nerve-testing barbarities. Meanwhile, 
however, we should not forget that King Lear in- 
dulges in the same sort of horrific variety of death, 
and that Hamlet all through from the very start to 
the last line is seasoned with an abounding condi- 
ment of poisonings and of blood-lettings, but on 
account of this nobody has yet proposed to elim- 
inate the melancholy Dane's life-drama from the 
poet's canon. Accordingly murder must be ac- 
cepted as a genuine Shakespearian asset — murder 
bloody, cruel, of many ingenious variations. And 
to-day we are not lacking in a like but grander ex- 
ample. Death, even violent death, we have been 
compelled to witness as spectators, perhaps unwill- 
ing, with the whole earth as the stage, during the 
recent war (1914-8). Far world-wider, more san- 
guinary and tiger-hearted has been this butcher}^ 
than that of petty Titus Andronicus, which thus we 



272 SHAKESPE ABE'S LIFE-DBAMA 

may deem to have just now received a fresh con- 
firmation and commentary written by old Time 
himself. Accordingly we have above cited, as good 
Shakespearian authority for this play 's horrors, the 
grewsome exclamation of the murdered Hamlet's 
ghost to his son: 

0, horrible, horrible, most horrible! 
Murder most foul as in the best it is. 
But this most foul, strange, and unnatural. 

The first point which should be now seized upon 
by the deeper and stronger-nerved student is just 
that old World-War which lies everywhere in the 
background of Titus Andronicus — the conflict be- 
tween the barbarians of the North, here represented 
by the Goths, and the Roman Empire with its civ- 
ilized institutions, manners, and laws. Such is the 
contrast often marked in respect of the two collid- 
ing elements of the play, as we may catch in the 
line : ' ' Thou art a Roman, be not barbarous. ' ' 
Then the Queen of the Gfoths is thus labeled : 
"Barbarous Tamora, for no name fits thy nature 
but thine own." Thus the dramatic action is 
placed right in the cataclysm of ancient civiliza- 
tion, when the latter was being broken up by Teu- 
tonic barbarism. The young poet has seized and 
portrayed this theme as his own time's and his 
own self's — Elizabeth's England was rocked with 
the throes of some such convulsion, as well as 
Shakespeare in person. 

The victorious Roman general Titus Andronicus 



TITVS ANDBONICVS 273 

has been called by the Senate "from weary wars 
against the barbarous Goths", of whom the Queen 
Tamora with her three sons appears on the scene, 
all being captives of Rome. The eldest of these 
royal Gothic sons is seized and savagely immolated 
' ' to appease their groaning shadows that are gone ' ', 
which shadow", are those of the twenty-one war- 
slain Roman sons of Andronicus, who still has four 
others living and here present along with one 
daughter Lavinia. Such is the play 's opening deed 
of blood, which the Gothic Queen and her sons in 
their turn proceed to avenge by slaying the brother 
and two of the remaining sons of Titus, and by hor- 
ribly mutilating and ravishing the daughter. This 
calls up in requital the drama's third grand ven- 
geance, that of Titus, who seeks to equal the pre- 
ceding horror by cutting the throats of the two 
remaining sons of the Gothic Queen, and serving 
up their cooked heads as a Thyestean banquet to 
their mother. The furious iiemesis of the play is 
let loose for the fourth time, and sweeps off the 
stage the Gothic Queen Tamora herself, the Roman 
general Titus Andronicus himself, along with the 
Emperor Saturninus in hideous rapid butchery, 
while the infernal Moorish villain, Aaron, the black 
devil of the action, is buried alive. Such is the 
feast of horrors, not all of them, but the main 
dishes. 

Is our poet the author of it — wholly, partially, 
or not at all ? Many shades of opinion we shall find 
if we range the commentators. It is an early, if not 



274 SB AKESPE ABB'S LIFE-DBAMA 

his earliest work, we hold; but a genuine, nay an 
indispensable part of his total Life-drama. We see 
here the boy, natural lover of things horrible; does 
he not to-day delight in stories of murder and 
bloody adventure — Bluebeard, Rinaldo Rinaldini, 
Jesse James, the Missouri brigands? And the 
newspaper — has it not its daily grist of assassina- 
tion, rapine, pistolades of all sizes, often tricked 
out in lengthy lurid imagery ? Young Shakespeare, 
like you, had also his sensational day, and he, the 
born creator, threw it out of himself into his native 
art-:form, the dramatic. Whereof we have here his 
chief, but not his only specimen. A link in the 
chain of his spirit's evolution we would lose if we 
left out his Titus Andronicus. 

Of course it is not possible to give the exact date 
of this play; it competes for the place of being 
Shakespeare's very first independent production at 
least with two if not three other dramas, Comedy 
of Errors, and Love's Labor's Lost, and even 
Richard III. It is easily conceivable that all of 
them may have been carried on for a time together ; 
an author usually puts to mental soak several co- 
temporaneous sketches of planned works, elaborat- 
ing and finishing them according to inner mood and 
outer call or opportunity. Ben Jonson who knew 
Shakespeare well and his dramatic history, in a 
passage belonging to 1614, dates Titus Andronicus 
back some ''twenty-five or thirtj^ years", which 
statement times the play's origin somewhere in our 
poet's era of drifting (1584-5 to 1588-9). Another 



TITUS ANDEONICUS 275 

hint of its date we may hear in its evident allusion 
to Marlowe's Tamburlane, staged in 1587-8, whose 
hero is the great barbaric Scythian conqueror of 
the Orient, when a Goth, himself a barbarian, ex- 
claims : ' ' Was ever Scythia half so barbarous ' ' as 
this civilized Rome? (I, 1, 131). Whereupon the 
Gothic reply follows: "Oppose (compare) not 
.Scythia to ambitious Rome ' ', for the latter employs 
really the more savagery. 

In fact there is a distinct kinship between Mar- 
lowe's Tmnburlane and Shak-^speare's Titus An- 
dronicus in theme, in style, in ruthlessness. Both 
poets were born in the same year, though Marlowe 
shot ahead of Shakespeare in the rapid maturity of 
his genius, and hence became the teacher and early 
master. Both were appreciative friends and co- 
workers, and both partook of the time's furious 
protest against tradition, as well as of its grand 
literary upburst, especially in the drama. Their 
two mentioned plays have fundamentally the same 
subject ; the conflict between Barbarism and Civil- 
isation, though the one dramatist takes the Orient 
for his scene and the other prefers Rome. On the 
whole, Marlowe makes the Barbarians conquer, 
while Shakespeare through all his bloodshed pre- 
serves the Roman State and with it the movement 
of the World's History by crowning a new em- 
peror at the murderous finale. Still in both we may 
feel the j^outhful revolt against the existing trans- 
mitted order ; through both runs an undertone of 
challenge to the accepted civilized society, 



276 SB AKESPE ABE'S LIFE-DBAMA 

Another characteristic of the present play is its 
pervading atmosphere of reminiscence, which re- 
calls the school-boy Shakespeare at Stratford in his 
classical studies. Crumbs of Latin a", well as Latin- 
isms often drop here from his ready tongue ; he is 
overflowing with incidents and tales from the 
Roman poets, Virgil, Horace, especially Ovid, and 
most especially from the latter 's Metamorphoses, 
already designated as a kind of literary bible for 
the youth as well as for the time's Renascence. 
Indeed we seem to be able to pick out of that mani- 
fold story-book the very tale which wrought the 
strongest fascination upon the boy William Shake- 
speare: it is the revolting legend of Philomela 
whose tongue was cut out to prevent her telling her 
wrongs after being ravished by King Pandion of 
Thebes. This monstrous myth drives through the 
entire action of Titus Andronicus, and constitutes 
one of its leading motives, mirroring the fate of 
Lavinia, daughter of Titus, and portraying the top- 
most horribility of the whole horrible drama. Some 
half a dozen recurrences of it therein I have 
counted, and I am led to think that it was just this 
tale working in the imagination of the young dra- 
matist, which gathered round itself as the original 
germ the other uncanny materials of this work, 
most of them seemingly fabricated by the boy him- 
self from his readings in Roman poetry and his- 
tory. For here he appears to dramatize in his own 
way all the Latin of his Stratford schooling. And 
the stranger fact is that this tale of terror never 



TITUS ANDBONWUS 277 

quit him in all his life, but haunted still his aged 
genius: whereof we may cull an example from 
Cymheline (II. 2, 46), one of his latest creations: 

. . . She (Imogen) hath been reading late 
The tale of Tereus : here the leaf 's turned down 
Where Philomel gave up — 

perchance in the poet's own copy of the Metamor- 
phoses, and the very book which his mother once 
presented him (we dare again imagine) , inasmuch 
as a boy here in the drama (IV. 1. 42), young 
Lucius, asserts with heartfelt reminiscence 

'Tis Ovid's Metamorphoses, 
My mother gave it me — 

So we may recall the one tenderest domestic islet 
in this ocean of blood. 

What a weird uncanny fascination such a des- 
perate myth seemed to wield over the young and 
the old Shakespeare ! How may we account for it ? 
Did he think, as he sat in the nearby Arden wood 
of an evening, to hear in the sad notes of the 
nightingale, who was the transformed Philomela, 
the inarticulate voice of his own tragic soul long- 
ing for musical utterance, and preluding the strain 
of his deepest genius hereafter to be unfolded into 
his full-worded greatness? We may be able to 
hearken the young poet communing with his Muse 
under the guise of his favorite song-bird (Two 
Gentlemen of Verona V. 4.4.) : 



278 SHAKESPEARE'S LIFE -DE AM A. 

Here can I sit alone, unseen of any, 
And to the nightingale 's complaining notes 
Tune my distresses and record my woes. 
thou that dost inhabit in my breast. 
Leave not the mansion so long tenantless — 

Such experiences he could have had only in his 
country-home at Stratford, where he as school-boy 
read the tale of Philomel, and listened to the song 
of the nightingale, forefeeling his own deeper call. 
Moreover he strews through this play incidents of 
the whole history of Rome, republican, imperial, 
medieval. For instance he introduces the Repub- 
lic's great struggle between plebeians and patri- 
cians, as well as custome and works belonging to 
papal Rome. Full of anachronisms runs the 
stream, and we say let them run. Still the action 
hovers about one great historic event: the conflict 
of the Roman Empire with the outlying Bar- 
barians. But the special history of Titus Androni- 
cus, as here employed, has never been discovered, 
it is declared, though several plays of this name 
were known to Shakespeare's time and became ex- 
ceedingly popular. Of the present plaj^ a number 
of quartos were printed during the poet's life, 
showing that it had also its voracious reading- 
public butressed with strong nerves. 

So we assign this play in full to Shakespeare as 
revealing a rudimentary but very necessary stage 
of the poet 's evolution. Without it there would be 
a gap in his self's all-rounded utterance and 



TITVS ANDBONICVS 279 

achievement. To be sure, it is not a pleasant play ; 
if the reader is seeking amusement merely, he can 
find it less shocking elsewhere. But if he wishes tc 
trace the entire development of the unique Life- 
drama of Shakespeare, even the disgustingly em- 
bryonic part, he will make a microscopic examina- 
tion of Titus Andronicus. He will find everywhere 
in it mementos of the Stratford school-boy satu- 
rated with his classicism. The daring young genius 
is at work, defiantly heaping together all sorts oC 
dramatic horrors, out-Kyding the redoubtable 
Thomas Kyd in making humanity hideous. Thus 
the play shows the protoplasmic dramaturgy of 
the nascent genius testing in writ devildom it- 
self. 

We believe that the researchful reader will feel 
a bent to compare this lowest play with highest 
Hamlet, which also registers on its list of blood 
some eight murders, and is not without its full 
tally of horrors. But marvelous is the difference 
between the two tragedies, and hence we grapple 
after the poet 's hidden thread of development from 
one to the other, running through ten or a dozen 
years. So savagely alike yet so humanly different ! 
Let the problem be deferred for the present ; one 
little point however we may score here: Hamlet 
portrays an unearthly revenge, yet at the same time 
the deepest reaction of the spirit against it ; while 
Titus Andronicus is pure nemesis quite without any 
backstroke of compunction. The hideous devil of 
the play Aaron, black outside and blacker inside, 



280 SHAKESPE ABE'S LIFE-DEAMA 

makes the sole scoffing allusion to the soul's inner 
remedial power: 

And hast a thing within thee called conscience — 

which thing or rather deity is enthroned in Ham- 
let, and rules the argument from start to finish. 

This youthful play, accordingly, has in it a good 
deal of prophecy forecasting the matured Shake- 
speare. As a tragedy we may take it to prelude 
the poet's tragic or second Period; it shoots many 
germs which we can trace fructifying in his later 
greatest works. It, moreover, has a marked affinity 
with Henry VI, already considered ; each repre- 
sents a world-chaos, the one being old Roman, the 
other medieval English, in which chaotic social 
upheavals the young genius of Titanic aspiration 
usually lets go his first creative delight; for he 
revolts against all tradition, and proposes, as the 
new-born demiurge, to make God's defective uni- 
verse more perfect than ever. Finally to-day no- 
body can forget that here is one phase of that 
twenty-centuried conflict between Teutonia and 
Roma, still seething and unsettled ; in this play 
specially it is designated as the war between the 
Goths and the Romans, or between Barbarism and 
Civilisation. 

Hence it results that this bloodiest work of Titus 
Andronicus became a popular theme all over North- 
ern Europe ; we read of old German and Dutch 
plays on the present subject along with several 
English ones besides that of Shakespeare. The 



BOMEO AND JULIET 281 

Teutonic folk of the North must have felt some 
very profound racial instinct fermenting in these 
dramas, betokening the eternal struggle between 
the Germanic and the Latin or Mediterranean 
worlds. Let it be again stated that this most fu- 
rious and deepest-seated dualism of Europe finds 
its highest poetic presentment and reconciliation 
in Shakespeare, originating in his case especially 
through his trip to Italy. 

ROMEO AND JULIET. 

So we pass, for the sake of revealing a chief 
node in the growth of Shakespeare, to what we may 
call the most thoroughly Italian or rather Italian- 
ized work of the poet, very successful and eternal. 
There is no telling how many years have run since 
the composition of the former Romanized play of 
Titus Andronicus, but we can observe a marked 
cultural change and transformation in the author. 
Both dramas, however, belong to the same epoch, 
the imitative, outreaching, experimental. Equally 
deep-motived is the transfer of the basic passion 
from bloody nemesis to tragic love. 

The transition of the poet from England to Italy 
may be repeatedly discerned in the play. First 
let it be noted that the great majority of the com- 
mentators predicate at least two redactions of the 
work, though the real significance of each they 
seem not distinctly to conceive. As we look at the 
matter, the earlier play or perhaps sketch was 



282 SHAKESPEARE'S LIFE-DBAMA 

English or rather pre-Italian ; the nurse who is an 
old English granny times her part as taking place 
in 1591, of which date she prattles: 

'Tis since the earthquake now eleven years, 
And she was weaned — I never shall forget it. 

Said earthquake was also English, hardly Italian, 
being chronicled in England under the year 1580. 
The nurse, though otherwise not pedantically exact 
in her chronology, is very emphatic here, so that 
we can say this speech of hers belongs to the first 
couple of years before Shakespeare's trip to Italy. 
On the other hand certain historic allusions in the 
drama seem to suggest events which occurred two 
or three years after the poet's return from the 
South. Such indications are indeed faint and 
vague, still they hint what the actual text of the 
work plainly shows: a pre-Italian and a post- 
Italian element running through the whole action, 
a lower comic and a higher tragic set of characters, 
a Northern and Southern strain in speech, man- 
ners, personages, yea in the very soul of the poetic 
organism. 

The first outer fact of this play, falling at once 
into the eye, hints already its deeper purport : the 
title is sexed, the man and woman are conjoined 
equally by name in the tragic action, Romeo and 
Juliet are here married forever by Shakespeare, 
and not till death shall separate them and bury 
them in oblivion. For before us they live and love 
to-day, indissoluble in their hot wedlock till per- 



BOMEO AND JULIET 283 

chance the planet itself may grow cold. The love- 
cult rising from this poem must have started soon 
after its first production, and it has been kept up 
ever since with a countless increase of communi- 
cants. Whereof an early indication may be found 
in Marston, a poet cotemporary with Shakespeare, 
who versifies his little laugh at stage-stricken love- 
lorn Luscus, the youth yearning for his heart's 
passionate expression through this drama: 

Luscus, what's played to-day? — Faith, now I 

know, 
I see thy lips abroach, from whence doth flow 
Naught but pure Juliet and Romeo. 

Here it is in place to note that these sexed titles 
are employed by Shakespeare in two other plays, 
both tragedies as labeled in the First Folio — 
Troilus and Cressida, to which must be superla- 
tively added Antony and Cleopatra. These are 
three works which reach through nearly his entire 
dramatic career, from almost its beginning till to- 
ward its close. Hence the question rises : why 
select just these three dramas out of the entire 
thirty-six (not thirty-seven) in which is stressed 
the sexual fact by elevating the woman alongside 
the man to mark the name of the work? In no 
other plays does our poet assign to the female a 
titular place alongside the male, or even alone, ac- 
cording to the baptismal register of the First Folio, 
which doubtless shows the poet choosing his own 
titles for his own productions. At least we may 



284 SHAKESPE ABE'S LIFE-DEAMA 

here premise that these three plays, so far apart in 
time of composition, but double-gendered in their 
very faces, are not so labeled by mere accident, but 
are kinned in some inner strain and outer structure 
common to them all, and mirrored in the personal 
evolution of the poet himself. 

Still the woman in many, yea in most of Shake- 
speare 's works, especially the Comedies, is the 
stronger and higher character, the dominant per- 
sonality, often carrying the deepest, indeed the 
mediatorial role of the dramatic conflict. Such is 
the honor with which our poet crowns her in all his 
latest dramas. But she never gets credit for her 
Shakespearian worth in the Shakespearian title, 
never is nominated in the inscription 's blazon. For 
instance, the Merchant of Venice surely ought to be 
called Portia. Just why may this not be? I have 
on occasion thought that it resulted from the fact 
that in Shakespeare's time his female roles were 
taken by a man, or oftener by a boy. But just 
imagine that stage when a piping adolescent with 
his voice cracking to discordant pieces all the way 
down between tenor and basso, had to speak the 
perfervid part of Juliet in the balcony love-scene 
or in the supulchre's death-scene. Let us not get 
addicted to the glorification of such a theatre, 
though it be Shakespeare's own Globe. Too much 
inclined we are to-day in our antiquarian craze to 
seek for Shakespeare himself in the petty details 
of Shakespeare's very imperfect stage. Let them 
not be neglected, but at the same time let it be duly 



BOMEO AND JULIET 285 

recognized that he is infinitely greater than his 
little scenic pinfold. The poet himself doubtless 
felt the inadequacy of such a presentation of his 
great woman, and we may hear his disgust (Antony 
and Cleopatra V. 2. 216) in what Cleopatra says 
as she thinks of herself when acted by a boy : 

The quick comedians 
Extemporally will stage us — and I shall see 
Some squeaking Cleopatra boy my greatness — 

which tells a fact taken directly from the actor's 
own experience. 

The very date has been handed down, December 
8, 1660, half a century after Shakespeare's activity, 
when the part of Desdemona was first played by a 
woman — then an awful innovation even for the 
English theatre. Still in spite of such an external 
handicap, the poet's female characters are of his 
all-best — doubtless better on the whole than his 
male. For Shakespeare has portrayed no Greatest 
Man — not a Christ, nor a Socrates, and his Caesar 
is not the mightiest Julius alive and doing his sov- 
ereign deed. Strange as it may seem, through 
that squeaking boy our poet has voiced and 
eternized some of the greatest and most command- 
ing woman-souls of all time. But in order to per- 
form such a feat, his genius in the supreme act of 
creation had to fling off the fetters of that cramp- 
ing Elizabethan stage-prison. We shiver to think 
of Cordelia modulating her boyish squeak on the 
boards : 



286 SHAEESPEASE'S LIFE-DBAMA 

Her voice was ever soft 
Gentle and low — an excellent thing in woman. 

Thus we judge that the sexed caption heard in 
the coupled names of this play, Romeo and Juliet, 
has its significance in the poet's total worK, espe- 
cially when taken in connection with the two other 
mentioned tragedies which are similarly titled. 
But this is not all. In his epopee of amorous pas- 
sion called Venus and Adonis is found another 
sexed designation, now legendary, of a goddess and 
a mortal youth. Also in his sonnets are paired the 
poet himself and his elusive Dark Lady. Notable 
is the fact that in all these cases — Juliet, Cressida, 
Cleopatra, Mary Fitton — the woman is the dom- 
inant, the compelling personality. Such must have 
been, in general the deepest Shakespearian convic- 
tion and underlying consciousness, brought to ac- 
tivity and enforced by some all-overmastering in- 
dividual experience. Here then we should recall the 
place of his sovereign mother in his early Stratford 
days. Can we forget in such a connection the mar- 
riage of the boy William Shakespeare with the 
much older Anne Hathaway? And his youthful 
flight from home? For that decisive experience 
may be detected working through his entire Pan- 
drama, inasmuch as we can feel a strong and very 
characteristic pulsation of it throbbing up full- 
hearted in his latest work, the Tempest (See IV. 1, 
15-22). So we may add to the foregoing sexed 
pairs of his writ, the original unwritten but the 
real ones, bonded at Stratford on the Avon, founda- 



BOMEO AND JULIET 287 

tion and first germinal reality of all these ideally 
visioned couples of his genius. 

This play of Romeo and Juliet has its very de- 
cided presuppositions, which must not be forgotten, 
though it be one of the poet 's most original produc- 
tions. Here we catch him again seizing his mate- 
rials wherever he may find them congenial to his 
Muse — the crude, unsmelted, and uncoined ore of 
his unversified gold, which he then proceeds t© 
mint into his poetical treasure. His prime quarry 
in the present case was a poem published before his 
birth (1562) by Arthur Brooke called Royneus and 
Juliet, which was written in rhymed Alexandrines, 
and furnished to the dramatist a quite complete 
outline of his story and of his characters with their 
names. Often too it motives the tendency to 
rhyme in the poet's drama, striking, as it were, 
the varied lyrical key-note of kissing words. An- 
other early English version in prose (1567) the 
young Shakespeare could have eagerly devoured in 
Palace of Pleasure. But the tale itself came to 
England from Italy, where it seems to have been 
universally diffused by the Italian romancers, es- 
pecially by the popular Bandello, whom Shake- 
speare is often supposed to have read in the orig- 
inal. Under many forms — novel, ballad, drama — 
the story became current throughout the whole 
Mediterranean world, in Spain, France as well as 
Italy; indeed it seems to have first burgeoned back 
in Greece, the germinal originator, as usual. This 
long record of popular evolution has its fascination. 



288 SHAKE SPEAEE'S LIFE-DBAMA 

but must here be omitted. Only one fact and one 
writer would we fish out of this vast mass of pro- 
toplasmic love-lore: Luigi da Porto about 1530 is 
declared to have been the first to join the two lovers 
Romeo and Juliet together by their lasting Shake- 
spearian names, and also to have made them the 
children of two antagonistic Veronese families — 
an ever-memorable thought-stroke of the obscure 
little Italian story-teller, and destined to embalm 
for long his rather dead name. Still when all is 
told, the chief credit of furnishing to our poet the 
whole storied skeleton of his drama, as well as hints 
for his English realistic characters, such as the 
Apothecary and the Nurse (though I believe that 
Shakespeare saw them both at Stratford and fresh- 
ened their features), belongs to the fore-mentioned 
Arthur Brooke. 

There is both external and internal evidence that 
the poet reveals a considerable evolution of himself 
during several years in this drama. The final stage 
oi' it is historically indicated in the title-page of 
the completed Quarto numbered the second, and 
dated 1599, which, somewhat abbreviated, runs 
thus : ^'The most excellent and lamentable Tragedy 
of Uomeo and Juliet. As it has been sundry times 
publicly acted. Newly corrected, augmented and 
amended — London." Here the striking point is 
the statement concerning the fresh elaboration and 
improvement of the play compared with its previ- 
ous form or forms, one of which may have been the 
First Quarto (1597) much smaller and less com- 



BOMEO AND JULIET 289 

plete. Thus we behold its last shape; what then 
was its first? Doubtless the dramatic hints which 
rose in the poet's mind from his early reading of 
Brooke's poem. That was the original germ round 
which his materials kept gathering for years, and 
which took up and assimilated his outer informa- 
tion on his subject as well as his inner experience 
of soul. Such are the two extremes, the finished 
organism and its originating cell, both fairly dis- 
cernible and documented in cotemporaneous print. 
But what intervening steps of ascent lay between 
that top and this bottom? These are doubtless 
largely conjectural, but I believe that of them we 
may catch the general outline. 

In the first place the Italian atmosphere and 
spirit which are so characteristic of the present 
poem, are, in my view, the result of Shakespeare's 
visit to Italy, of which something has been already 
said. The poet required his subject to be primarily 
saturated with his own immediate experience of 
life ; this was what his genius specially needed for 
its work of artistic transfiguration. His Italian 
Journey probably took place about 1592-3, and 
naturally the poetic traveler carried the first 
draught of his Romeo and Juliet, as well as that of 
his Venus and Adonis, along with him to the land 
of art and poetry. In like manner Goethe (we 
may repeat) who, in his younger time had con- 
ceived and written in prose his Iphigenia and his 
Tasso, rewrote and transformed them into their 
present poetic completeness while in Italy, which 



290 SHAKESPEABE'S LIFW-DEAMA 

land gave him his new artistic inspiration. Yet 
how different was the effect of this Italian Journey 
upon the two world-poets ! Goethe sought to re- 
cover the antique form and spirit, and would re- 
produce them in his two dramas, while Shakespeare 
appropriated the form and spirit of the modern 
Italian Renascence, and dropped or perchance 
transmuted his old-Roman tendency. Still there 
is no doubt he saw and studied ancient art, of 
which Italy was so full. Thus he now Italianized 
himself, as he had before Romanized himself, for 
instance in Titus Andronicus. 

But the second and far more distinctive atmos- 
phere enveloping Romeo and Juliet is that of love, 
youthful love of man and woman, which here finds 
its sovereign expression in human writ. Under- 
neath all this passionate upburst lay also a corre- 
sponding personal experience. There is no doubt 
that during these years Shakespeare breasted his 
first overwhelming tidal wave of love, which per- 
sisted the underlying ever-driving passion of his 
Life-drama. For now the Dark Lady starts to 
weave her voluptuous but fatuous strand not 
merely into his emotions but into the very soul 
of his creative genius, of which fact we catch fre- 
quent shimmerings reflected from the glow of these 
tragical lovers. 

Somewhere, then, between the completed form of 
his drama (Quarto 1599) and the first budding of 
it, say seme eight years before, lay those two grand 
experiences, his trip to Italy and his new passion. 



BOMEO AND JULIET 291 

To the latter the transition from his old unrequited 
love, imaged in Eomeo's change from Rosaline to 
Juliet, is made with some emphasis in the play, 
even if it is already found in Brooke as well as in 
himself. About 1595-6, hence after his return from 
Italy, the Dark Lady begins her long triumphant 
reign over his heart and thence over his creative 
energy, whereof we find a more or less continuous 
record in the Sonnets. 

One of the early Sonnets (No. 23) may be taken 
to represent the poet's first bashful attempt to de- 
clare his love, so that he begs his lady to look into 
his writ for what he has been unable to speak. 

As an imperfect actor on the stage 
Who with his fear is put besides his part, 
Or some fierce thing replete with too much rage, 
Whose strength's abundance weakens his own 

heart ; 
So I, for fear of trust, forget to say 
The perfect ceremony of love's rite, 
And in mine own love's strength seem to decay 
O'ercharg'd with burden of mine own love's 

might. 
let my books be then the eloquence 
And dumb presagers of my speaking breast, 
Who plead for love and look for recompense, 
More than that tongue that more hath more 

expressed. 
learn to read what silent love hath writ ; 
To hear with eyes belongs to love 's fine wit. 



292 SHAKESPEAHE'S LIFE-DRAMA. 

Who may be the addressee starts the problem here 
as everywhere in the Sonnets — man, woman, or 
something else. In the above case only a woman 
approached by her embarrassed admirer ' ' who for- 
gets to say the perfect ceremony of love 's rite ' ' fits 
the situation. The poet, though he stammer help- 
less before such a presence, knows that in his books 
he can beat the world in expressing love, where his 
lady must ''learn to read what silent love hath 
writ." So the sonneteer celebrates his power of 
self-expression through his pen for the relief of his 
over-burdened heart : such is supremely the writer, 
his book is his confession and perchance his expia- 
tion. In like manner the dramatist has given utter- 
ance to his own intense love-thrills in those of 
Romeo; but he goes through and gets rid of his 
jjassion's tragedy through that of his hero. He 
saves himself by slaying his tragic counterpart. 
Still this play is but the overture to the grand 
symphony of his love-life of which much remains 
yet to be lived and loved, and then to be expressed. 
II. Comedies of the Present Epoch. Let us em- 
phasize the main point at the start : just as we saw 
two kinds of Tragedies dividing this Second Epoch, 
namely the pre-Italian and the post-Italian, so we 
shall find the same division of it in the Comedies 
belonging here, of which we set down three in suc- 
cessive order — The Comedy of Errors, The Two 
Gentlemen of Verona, and Love's Labor's Lost. 
This may be also the chronological sequence of these 
plays, as they came from the workshop of the 



COMEDIES OF PEESENT EPOCH 293 

author; but there is not proof enough at hand to 
decide that question. Still it is quite generally 
agreed that they all belong to one Epoch, and an 
early one, of the poet's productivity. 

A little inspection, however, will show that the 
first one The Comedy of Errors is pre-Italian, old- 
Roman in story, names, locality, being imitated 
from a classic Latin play. Equally certain is it 
that the next Comedy The Two Gentlemen of 
Verona is Italianized in story, names, locality, 
with a personal experience of places lacking in the 
first. But the third Comedy above mentioned em- 
braces both sides, being made up of a pre-Italian 
as well as a post-Italian element, the one being 
derived from England and the other from Italy, 
though both are located in Navarre. Thus Love's 
Labor's Lost seems a coalescence, if not a reconcilia- 
tion of English and Italian, of Northern and 
Southern, of Teutonic and Romanic, which the poet 
will keep working at and repeating throughout his 
entire Life-drama. So we may again re-say: he 
harmonized, at least in his art, Roma and Teutonia, 
that primordial deepest dualism of Europe, whereof 
the first pronounced note, even if not yet clarified 
is heard in these works. 

Such is the inner thread of connection which we 
shall try to track through these three plays, and 
show them as three consecutive phases, pre-Italian. 
fiost-Italian, and the conjunction of the two, reveal- 
ing three single steps, so to speak, in the evolution 
of the universal poet. 



294 SMAKESPE ABE'S LIFE-DBAMA 

COMEDY OF ERRORS. 

Good judges have pronounced this the earliest 
play of Shakespeare as to time of origin. Quite 
possible, but there is no real proof; and it has to 
compete with several others for such first starting 
place. That it belongs to Shakespeare, however, 
there are two best witnesses : Francis Meres (1598) 
and the First Folio (1623), It is still seen upon 
the boards, but its chief interest for the full- 
fiedged Shakespearian is its biographic significance. 
It is permeated with the poet's Stratford happen- 
ings, which must have been very fresh in his mind 
when he wrote this drama. Of course he throws 
his own experience far back into classic antiquity, 
and practises this early dramatic self-estrangement 
or disguise of himself, which is to become his occu- 
pation for life. So we have here a chance to watch 
Shakespeare's primal transformation of his own 
selfhood into his art. 

Most puppet-like play on the outside in all 
Shakespeare, yet very germinal of his future work, 
containing many of its embryons : this Comedy of 
Errors, superficial as it seems, is deserving of a far 
deeper and more appreciative study as a phase in 
the evolution of Shakespeare than I have yet seen 
in any of the hundred and one commentators. It 
is a very bright, rapid, superficial, but compre- 
hensive labyrinth of Accident and of the manifold 
illusions caused by it in man's individual and as- 
sociative life ; for not only single persons but insti- 



COMEDY OF EBBOBS 295 

tutions — Family, State, the Business World and 
the Social Order — get entangled in its gossamer- 
woven meshes of deceptive appearances. The hu- 
man being is shown the victim of Chance, his senses 
simply tell him lies, and he becomes the sport of 
the grand Hindoo Maya for a while at least. So 
the hapless wayfarer is brought to believe himself 
a lost soul in a devil-ruled Inferno ; no wonder that 
the poor mortal Antipholus, mirage-led through 
falsehood 's maze of a world, loses himself externally 
and internally, exclaiming 

Am I in earth, in heaven or in hell ? 
Sleeping or waking ? mad or well-advised ? 
Known unto these and to myself disguised ! 

Still we are never to forget that the course of 
the drama shows this lying realm of Chance to be 
undone and indeed self-undone; the false plays 
false to itself and thus betrays itself as truly false. 
Hence the whole action is comic, ridiculous, vanish- 
ing in a laugh of the spectators, who sit outside 
and above these cozening appearances. But the 
victim, who is enmeshed in them, will tremblingly 
whisper : 

This town (world) is full of cozenage — 
As nimble jugglers that deceive the eye 
Dark- working sorcerers that change the mind. 
Soul-killing witches that deform the body, 
Disguised cheaters, prating mountebanks 
And many such-like liberties of sin . 



296 SHAKESPEABE'S LIFE-DBAMA 

So the lie-beridden soul will try to run away from 
his own untruth, but runs right into it again, since 
it rises before him everywhere, till he goes through 
it and masters its sense-deceiving prestidigitation. 
Whereof this comedy of "Errors", that is, of Il- 
lusions, inner and outer, gives quite a serious lesson 
just through its laughter. 

The means here employed is called Mistaken 
Identity, or Misplaced Personality, in which the 
wrong person is taken for the right one, and the 
right person in his turn is taken for the wrong one : 
so we may state the matter in popular, if not very 
correct phrasing. Then two sets of Mistaken Iden- 
tities represented in the two groups of twins — the 
two Antipholuses and the two Dromios — are thrown 
all commingled together into this sense-world, 
whereby they and it are subjected to the grand 
discipline of Illusion, or ' ' Error ' ' as the poet terms 
it. Still further, the identity (or resemblance) 
extends not only to the looks of the twins, but to 
their names and even to their dress. Thus an out- 
side and unknown power seems to be directing 
them like so many puppets into all sorts of mis- 
taken cognitions and recognitions, for which they 
get in one way or other mistaken punishments as 
well as mistaken loves. So these good Christians 
begin in their extremity to think of prayer, though 
the drama is set in ancient Greek Heathendom: 

for my beads ; I cross me for a sinner ! 
This is the fairy land : spite of spites ! 



COMEDY OF EBEOES 297 

We talk with goblins, owls, and elvish sprites : 
If we obey them not, this will ensue. 
They'll suck our breath, or pinch us black and 
blue. 

And now in accord with the purpose of this book 
of ours we have to ask, what has Shakespeare's 
I/ife-drama to do with this variegated tangle of 
Mistaken Identities? A good deal of straight-out 
personal experience he could have enjoyed in this 
matter within his own family. His father, John 
Shakespeare of Henley Street, trader, ale-taster, 
butcher and what not, had his double in name right 
in Stratford, to-wit, John Shakespeare, the thriving 
shoemaker of Bridge Street, which fact could 
hardly help causing to outsiders and even to towns- 
men some confusion, and must have been known to 
the quick-witted fun-loving lad William Shake- 
speare. And one rather faint report has reached 
us that both these Johns had for wives two Marys, 
whereby the identity in names becomes again 
doubled. Now it so happens that some of the busi- 
ness troubles of our John Shakespeare have been 
mistakenly ascribed to shoemaker John by certain 
modern writers ; thus a small bit of the real Shake- 
spearian Comedy of Errors has been staged in our 
day. 

Let us now imagine our school-boy, sprightly 
William, during this time to take a reading lesson 
under the tuition of Master Simon Hunt B. A., 
graduate of Oxford, in Latin Plautus, whose drama 



298 SHAKESPE ABE'S LIFB-DEAMA 

Menaechmi turns just on a ease of Mistaken Iden- 
tity, and is supposed to have furnished the chief 
suggestions for Shakespeare's own Comedy of Er- 
rors. Would not the alert pupil say in class: "I 
know something of that sort right here in Strat- 
ford; it is my own dad's case" — a Shakespearian 
household word, let the horrified reader reflect. 
Such a lesson would give the germ of his future 
play — the mistake through the same name. Then 
the mistake through personal resemblance is even 
more frequent. Have you not, my dear sir, mis- 
taken and been mistaken often in that same way — 
taken some one for somebody else and been your- 
self so taken? Of such kind are the gifts of expe- 
rience out of which the Genius conjures his poetic 
fabric. 

Thus he dramatizes his own immediate observa- 
tion into the Latin transmitted model, which, how- 
ever, he amplifies and improves. Both elements, 
the transmitted and the original, are necessary for 
him and will last him through life. Note too that 
this little work flows all of a piece, shows a per- 
vasive unity both of form and of spirit, and seems 
to have been finished at one long pull of breath, as 
it were under a single unbroken inspiration. More- 
over it is Shakespeare 's shortest play, counting only 
1770 lines, while Hamlet (3929 lines) is more than 
twice as long, and so are several other of his trage- 
dies. It has no division into Southern and North- 
ern characters, into Latin and English elements, 
such as we see in quite all his later dramas, both 



COMEDY OF EBBOBS 299 

Comedies and Tragedies. Even the clowns here 
speak in verse with two or three small exceptions 
of prose, which may be taken as the start of the 
poet's later habit. In this respect also the present 
play is germinal. 

On account of such an external sport of contin- 
gencies, which, however, are nicely and subtly dove- 
tailed into one another, we have here the appear- 
ance of a highly complicated mechanism, of a many- 
threaded spinning-jenny moved by an outside un- 
seen power. Thus it lays bare the pure machinery 
of all dramatic construction; or we may deem it 
the stripped skeleton of Comedy's very organism, 
which is hereafter to be covered by the life-artist 
with living flesh. For such reason it is the least 
soulful, the least inward-revealing of all Shake- 
speare's dramas, though it mirrors a good many 
external incidents of the poet's juvenescence. 
Hence it often recalls Stratford, I believe it to be 
on the whole more Stratfordian than any other pro- 
duction of his Muse, though there is somewhat of 
his Stratford discipline in all his writ, and more 
particularly in his earlier efforts. 

And now we come to consider the one very pro- 
nounced exception to the more or less external pup- 
petry of this drama, even if it must be granted that 
there are some marked differences (but rather con- 
ventional) of character peeping out of the obliter- 
ating identities between the two Dromios. These, 
however, we shall hurry by in order to stress the 
one living incarnation in this comedy: it is the 



300 SEAKESPE ABE'S LIFE-DBAMA 

iully vitalized woman Adriana, wife of Ephesian 
Antopholus. Read her part all through the play, 
and you will feel in it the throb of immediate ex- 
perience beating out of the heart of the author, 
who is here warily telling on himself and his own 
household, and not merely fabricating out of his 
head a highly convoluted amazing gimcrack for the 
idle diversion of his theatrical audience. To be 
sure, by way of contrast and opposition to Adriana, 
her sister Luciana gets endowed with a consider- 
able amount of vital portraiture, so that we see in 
her petite features the germs of a number of the 
poet's later and more fully evolved women-char- 
acters. 

Accordingly we are now permitted to overhear 
Shakespeare at home with his rather oldish wife, 
who, notwithstanding has in less than three years 
presented to him three babies — he being still under 
age and having no money and little earning power. 
Hence we soon catch her self-pitying outcry: "a 
wretched soul, bruised with adversity", and she 
spurns "this fool-begged patience" which is so 
easily advised by her unmarried sister Luciana. 
Moreover the still juvenile Shakespeare has got the 
habit of straying from his too domestic household, 
as we can hear in the poor wife's bitter reproaches, 
for instance 

But he, the unruly deer, he breaks the pale 
And feeds from home ; poor I am but his stale. 

The result is a knifing jealousy weaponed with an 
ever-whetted tongue, which she fails not to un- 



COMEDY OF EBBOBS 301 

sheathe and slash at him whenever he crosses his 
own door-sill. Who is this ' ' poor I ' ' who can pour 
so much reality into her sorrows? Of course it is 
Adriana, a wife living in far-away Ephesus, and 
talking a kind of Greek which the reader must 
translate into Stratfordese, if he wishes to under- 
stand what it is all about. 

Then we feel to be almost cruel, indeed unnat- 
ural, the outspoken way in which the poet makes 
that home-tied wife uncover not only her domestic 
situation, but also her physical and mental short- 
comings. For while the all-gifted youth ranges 
abroad and showers the gems of his genius both in 
love and poesy upon "his minions", chiefly female, 

I at home starve for a merry look — ■ 
Hath homely age the alluring beauty took 
From my poor cheek? Then he hath wasted it. 

Did he not hear this from ageing Anne Hathaway 
more than once? And is he not the real source of 
her wreckage? Or is it that antique Ephesian 
Dame Adriana who has been "ruined" in form 
and feature by bearing three children to her hus- 
band, the young and dashing Antipholus, in less 
than three years, though such special circumstance 
she naturally does not mention? But listen: 

That 's not my fault — he is master of my state — 

What ruins are in me that can be found 

By him not ruined ? Then is he the ground 

Of my defeatures. 

A sunny look of his would soon repair — 



302 SHAKESPE ABE'S LIFE-DBAMA 

but no sunburst can seemingly break through that 
eternal domestic storm-cloud. Still further, our 
hapless Adriana is made to confess her intellectual 
deficiencies in the eyes of her Antipholus : 

Are my discourses dull ? barren my wit ? 
If voluble and sharp discourse be marred, 
Unkindness blunts it more than marble hard. 

Really we may catch Shakespeare telling on him- 
self in these and similar passages, and revealing 
the trend of his fateful domesticities. He pours 
molten into these burning words of wife Adriana 
his own blood-hot personal experiences; and one 
chief indication is that he forgets himself in his 
intensity and falls out of his role, for surely this 
Adriana (or Anne Hathaway) is not barren of 
wit or dull of discourse. In fact, she is just as 
witty, just as poetic, just as overflowing with young 
genius as young William himself, if not rather 
more so than usual, for the reason that he gets to 
voicing through her words his own deepest Life- 
drama. By the way this dropping of the formal 
role for himself we shall often detect as a sign of 
the self -intrusion of the real Shakespeare, and gen- 
erally at his mightiest. Read her part carefully 
and you will say that this shrewish self -disparaging 
Adriana is the most capable, the most living person 
in the play. Shakespeare would never have quit 
such a wife, with a genius equal to his own. So 
we shall try to catch and to hold fast our Protean 
poet in his thousandfold transformations till he re- 



COMEDY OF EBBOES 303 

veals himself in his one true fundamental shape, 
which not infrequently rises to the surface and be- 
comes visible and distinct from Ids vast circum- 
ambient dramatic ocean. Watch him work till you 
can sense the pure gold of his poetry, as it starts 
to flowing out of the heart of his experience into its 
eternally current coinage of English speech. 

Finally we dare indentify another passage of this 
play with a home-scene in Stratford. In the last 
Act we begin to get suspicious when the good moral 
Abbess defends the wayward, rather un-moral 
Antipholus. With much vigor she turns her tirade 
against the jealous wife Adriana : 

The venom clamors of a jealous woman 

Poisons more deadly than a mad dog 's tooth. 

It seems his sleeps were hindered by thy rail- 
ing .. . 

Thou sayst his meat was sauced with thy up- 
braidings. 

The result is, as points the partial Abbess sharply: 
thou hast ' ' scared thy husband from the use of his 
wits. ' ' No very religious role is this for our strict 
Run, who so gently touches the husband's pecca- 
dillos when his roomy eye 

Strayed his affection in unlawful love — 
A sin prevailing much in youthful men 
Who give their eyes the liberty of gazing. 

I wonder who this rather prejudiced woman- judge 
may be. My guess is, mother Mary Arden Shake- 



304 SEAKESPEAEE'S LIFE-DBAMA 

speare is here voiced by her poetical son in the 
great family dispute which led to his flight from 
Stratford. Perhaps some faint religious tendency 
we may also catch in her note, for she belonged to 
a Catholic family, though probably she was not a 
Catholic herself. Thrice mothered we dare con- 
ceive this maternal Abbess, being not only the 
Christian Mother Superior of a priory in heathen 
Ephesus, but also the dramatic mother of Antipho- 
lus, and finally the real mother of young Shake- 
speare. 

Could the poet help remembering, in writing this 
drama, that he was likewise separated from his 
twin babes, having been wrecked for the time being 
in his life's voyage by a tempest, doubtless of some 
violence? No exact dates are possible, or needed, 
but let us think the husband within a couple of 
years after leaving his wife and infants behind at 
Stratford, meditating and composing in London 
this play of the storm-sundered family, as a me- 
mento of his past, and then ideally bringing its 
scattered members together again at the close, as 
a prophetic hope of the future — which early dream 
this Life-drama of his, after much delay and dis- 
cipline, will at last fulfil in the deed. So the Shake- 
spearian mother (she lived till 1608) finally unites 
and reconciles the disrupted family. Hence the 
double-visioned reader may see not merely the 
Mother Superior of a far-away drama but the 
Mother Superior of the poet William Shakespeare 
himself now writing his Life-drama, as she hope- 



TWO GENTLEMEN OF V EBON A 305 

fully forecasts her son's return to Stratford and 
to her, in these final tender words of hers entreat- 
ing the gathered household 

To go with us into the abbey here, 
And hear at large discoursed all our fortunes ; 
And all that are assembled in this place, 
That by this sympathized one day's error 
Have suffered wrong, go keep us company, 
And we shall make full satisfaction. 
Thirty three years have I but gone in travail 
Of you, my sons — 

especially of that one darling genius of a son, now 
happily restored to her after long separation. 

For such reasons we deem the present play very 
close to Shakespeare's own self at his dramatic 
starting-point, and best to be placed several years 
before his Italian journey, of which it shows no 
personally experienced trace. But his next drama 
is mooded to a different key. 

THE TWO GENTLEMEN OF VERONA. 

Verona connects by a local tie this play with 
Romeo and Juliet, or the two lovers of Verona. 
But also in style, mood, theme both dramas inter- 
weave and recall each other for the sympathetic 
reader. They are in a manner paired, though the 
one be a comedy and the other a tragedy. We feel 
in each the Italian spell of the poet, and its dom- 
inant passion ; both were probably composed about 



306 .'^EAKESPE ABE'S LIFE-DBAMA 

the same time though their merits be so different, 
ranging the whole gamut from lofty success down 
quite to failure. 

Still this play has its unique place and value in 
the Life-drama of the author, and is truly indis- 
pensible. More than any other production of his it 
tells about the traveler Shakespeare on his Italian 
trip, which means so much to his present and his 
future. Also it gives his views generally about the 
training through travel, though under a dramatic 
mask, transparent enough when seen from the right 
angle of vision. 

Still a poor drama : I may dare call it the poor- 
est of Shakespeare 's whole thirty-six ; thin for him 
in matter and in power, though it has some pretty 
rememberable passages, even if not very deep and 
compelling, like 

The current that with gentle murmur glides, 
Thou know'st, being stopped, impatiently doth 

rage; 
But when his fair course is not hindered 
He makes sweet music with the enamelled stones, 
Giving a gentle kiss to every sedge 
He overtaketh in his pilgrimage; 
And so by many winding nooks he strays 
With willing sport to the wild Ocean. 

AVherein is well illustrated this play's poetic flow 
which ripples like little Avon but never surges to 
wildly Oceanic Shakespeare, whose speech else- 
where frequently roars as the tempest and tosses 



TWO GENTLEMEN OF TEBONA 307 

US skyward. Nor is the characterization very ro- 
bust, but runs along rather shallow and formal; 
and the wind-up is a right break-down, so that we 
cry out in pain, ''0 most lame and impatient con- 
clusion ! " In our day it is hardly worth a serious 
reading except for one thing, which specially con- 
cerns us now: it carries along in its limpid but 
insignificant stream, somewhat under the surface at 
times, divers important personal facts about the 
poet's previous experience. 

So many little things turn up like Shakespeare, 
yet without the burst of his genius, without the in- 
dividual seal of his Muse, that if I should come into 
my knowing it for the first time, I would say to 
myself: 'Hhe work of a promising but youthful 
imitator ; I think I have read quite as good repro- 
ductions of Shakespeare poetically as this drama." 
But the real objective evidence will not permit us 
for a moment to assign it to any lesser cotemporary 
playwright, as its authenticity is vouched for by the 
two best possible witnesses: the First Folio (1623) 
where it is printed second in the list of Comedies, 
and the word of Francis Meres (1598) who places 
it first of his six cited Comedies. Thus both sources 
fully authorize it and also hint its early produc- 
tion, but give no date. 

Hence this youthful imitator of Shakespeare is 
the young Shakespeare himself, and his seeming 
imitation is really his own immature but growing 
production. Still we must repeat that the more it 
falls short in poetic value, the more it appears to 



308 SHAKESPE ABE'S LIFE-DBAMA. 

increase in biographic import ; if it fails to grip us 
as a single drama when taken alone, it more than 
makes up the loss by the renewed interest in itself 
when considered as an integral part and connecting 
link in the poet's total Life-drama, whose develop- 
ment is now our supreme endeavor. 

Accordingly we shall tally the several successive 
points which come before us in viewing the action 
from the present angle. 

I. At the start the play stresses the cultural 
need of travel — of separation from fireside and 
country in case of the ambitious young man, such 
as is Shakespeare now: "Home-keeping youths 
have ever homely wits. ' ' Hence the cry is : up and 
be off on thy trip to foreign lands, where it is thy 
better lot 

To see the wonders of the world abroad, 
Than living dully sluggardized at home 
Wear out thy youth with shapeless idleness. 

So says Valentine evidently voicing that aspiring 
young man William Shakespeare, who is now 
tensely minded to set out upon his travels. The 
locality is declared to be Italian Verona, and the 
destination thence is Milan, seat of the Emperor's 
court, where his j^outh will not be worn out "with 
shapeless idleness. ' ' 

But here the reader soon gets inquisitive. Verona 
and Milan are in the same country. Northern Italy, 
and not so many hours distant from each other. 
This fact Shakespeare must have known from his 



TWO GENTLEMEN OF VEBONA 309 

guide-book or from his Italian teacher at London, 
Giovanni Florio. Why then such a big flourish 
over such a little promenade? No Veronese could 
possibly say or think that he was starting to travel 
"abroad" on skipping over to Milan, and there 
was able "to see the wonders of the world." But 
Oi whom could such a statement be made? Of the 
poet himself setting out from London on his con- 
siderable Italian journey, then of course far more 
difficult than now. Here again we may catch 
Shakespeare himself peeping out from behind his 
mask, and even telling his own plan of travel. StiU 
further we find (IV. 1, 33) that this Valentine 
Shakespeare is specially gifted with "the tongues" 
for his trip, which plural word may well hint, be- 
sides English, the Italian and probably the French 
languages, of both of which Shakespeare shows 
himself to have some knowledge in his plays. But 
to journey from Verona to Milan the Veronese 
traveler would surely need only the one tongue, his 
own cultivated Italian, and he would even under- 
stand the popular dialect of Milan which is not so 
very unlike his own. But our Valentine Shake- 
speare evidently takes a good deal of pleasure in his 
knowledge of "the tongues", as we may catch from 
his wee note of self-gratulation : 

My youthful travel therein made me happy 
Or else I often had been miserable. 

Moreover this accomplishment is one of the reasons 
why he is suddenly promoted to be captain of a 



310 SHAEESPE ABE'S LIFE-DEAMA. 

band of outlaws, as they are just now seeking for 
"a linguist and a man of such perfection", who 
also is ''beautified with goodly shape". Very ap- 
preciative of Shakespeare's excellences are those 
Robin Hood rangers of the ''Forest near Milan": 

We '11 do thee homage and be ruled by thee 
Love thee as our commander and our King. 

And now we are to consider the second and even 
more emphatic appraisement of travel. Proteus, 
friend of Valentine, has been held at home in 
Verona by love, so that he refused to budge from 
the town. The result is that his father is impor- 
tuned by a friendly adviser to take in hand his 
untraveled son: 

To let him spend his time no more at home. 
Which would be great impeachment to his age 
In having known no travel in his youth. 

The anxious parent has been already "hammering" 
at the problem, and we hear again a little disserta- 
tion on the cultural value of traveled experience, 
in which we have to think also of the poet : 

I have considered well his loss of time. 
And how he cannot be a perfect man 
Not being tried and tutored in the world. 
Experience is by industry achieved 
And perfected by the swift course of time. 

But the next question is: "Whither were I best 
to send him?" This was doubtless Shakespeare's 



TWO GENTLEMEN OF VEEONA 311 

own question to himself. The answer runs : to Mi- 
lan, now capital of Italy, which is the high abode 
of ''the Emperor's court". Hither accordingly 
Proteus, too, the son, has to speed after Valentine. 

So much investigation we have spent upon this 
overture of travel in the present play, since it mir- 
rors with some detail a memorable passage in 
Shakespeare's Life-drama: his journey from home 
abroad, from London to Italy. Also it hints the 
transition from the purely Classic discipline of his 
previous stage to the culture of the Italian Rena- 
scence, which will live with him in one form or 
other to the close of his career. Thus we are here 
made to pass from the spiritual atmosphere of the 
Comedy of Errors to that of the Two Gentlemen of 
Verona — a weighty experience in the poet's evolu- 
tion. 

At this connecting point we may touch upon 
certain difficulties. In the first place Shakespeare 
implies that Verona is a sea-port with ships at 
anchor and ready to sail. So Valentine says on 
leaving : 

My father at the road (harbor) 
Expects my coming, there to see me shipped — 

Whereat much Herculean labor from the com- 
mentators, even to the extent of digging up from 
old records a forgotten canal between Verona and 
Milan, both of them seemingly inland cities. But 
here let it be said that our dramatist often masks 
his geography as well as his deeds and himself. So 



312 SRAKESPE ABE'S LIFE-DBAMA 

Valentine Shakespeare finds no difficulty in taking 
ship from Verona — London — for fair Italy, and 
even for Milan, nor did his English audience, nor 
need you, his reader to-day, though expert in 
geography. 

Another crux for most of us, though generally 
sliunned by the poet's expositors, is that above- 
cited expression ^'shapeless idleness" which will 
"wear out thy (Shakespeare's) youth dully slug- 
gardized at home. ' ' Here seems hinted the special 
trouble which is to be cured by the journey to Italy, 
to form-giving Italy, which has the power to 
remedy the young poet's sodden inartistic shape- 
lessness, A similar reason Goethe assigns for his 
Italian journey: he, the shapeless Northerner, 
would take up and make his own the peculiar gift 
of the formful South in its art. That also Shake- 
speare won and employed this unique excellence 
derived from renascent Italy, can be traced 
throughout his whole coming achievement. 

II. One of these two Veronese gentlemen, Val- 
entine, we have seen setting out on his travels with 
single-minded determination, so that from the start 
we feel his strength of purpose in accord with his 
name (from Latin valeo). Thus Valentine im- 
presses us with his will, is indeed a will-character. 
In marked contrast with him is limned the inner 
nature of his friend, labeled with evident design 
Proteus, a changeful fluctuating spirit, if there 
ever was one — in fine an emotional character. The 
name suggests the infinitely variable in form, like 



TWO GENTLEMEN OF VEEONA 313 

the sea-waves, once be-sung of old Proteus in the 
Odyssey. Moreover it brings a suggestion out of 
our boy's book of tales, Ovid's Metamorphoses, 
which is literally a Protean work, showing many 
transformations from manifold causes. But the 
chief cause in the case of this present Proteus is 
love with its numberless caprices and moody turns. 
Hence Proteus addresses his adorable quite in 
Ovidian reminiscence : 

Thou, Julia, hast metamorphosed me, 
Made me neglect my studies, lose my time, 
War with good counsel, set the world at nought, 
Made wit with musing weak, heart sick with 
thought. 

Such is the poet's own inner condition, his emo- 
tional ups and downs, which he has painted all his 
life in thousandfold iridescence. So we have to 
think that here we glimpse Shakespeare again self- 
portrayed with a look back upon his Stratford 
studies. Now he is the counterpart to strong-willed 
Valentine, the other half of himself, and becomes 
the ever-yielding victim of love's emotions, not 
their suppressor and exterminator. Thus we, like 
ancient Ulysses, are summoned to watch, the inner 
metamorphoses of this new Proteus Shakespeare, 
in contrast with his other and opposite moiety, the 
well-anchored Valentine Shakespeare. 

In such fashion we find our poet dramatizing 
his own myriad-minded selfhood into many diverse 
characters. Here two opposing kinds or phases of 



314 SHAKESPEABE'S LIFE-DBAMA 

himself he projects into two of his dramatic person- 
ages. His present dual nature he sets forth in all 
its duality; a double-souled mortal Shakespeare 
rc-veals himself, reminding us of his world-poetical 
brother, Goethe, who in his Faust feelingly ex- 
claims that he has two ever-separating souls in his 
breast : 

Zwei Seelen wohnen, ach ! in dieser Brust, 
Die eine will sich von der andern trennen. 

III. Still in this drama likewise there is evolved 
and enthroned the one all-conqueror, Love, who at 
last seizes and overwhelms his former contemptu- 
ous and defiant foe, none other than our will- 
powerful Valentine, who, having traveled all the 
way from Verona to Milan, sees the daughter of the 
Duke, the high-born and beautiful Silvia, and on 
the spot succumbs. And the thing has been done 
with such celerity and vehement effervescence of 
emotion that his servant jester Speed has noted it, 
and rallies his master as having become just "like 
Sir Proteus. ' ' Moreover the fellow has also caught 
from his superiors a shred of Ovidian phraseology, 
chaffing his lord thus: "Now you (too) are meta- 
tnorphosed with a mistress, that, when I look on 
you, I can hardly think you my master. ' ' 

Here we detect again the confession of the poet 
crowning Love the sovereign not simply of this 
drama, but of his life ; both sides of his double na- 
ture, the Will and the Emotion, have submitted to 
csnQ autocrat. Shakespeare acknowledges himself 



TWO GENTLEMEN OF VEBONA 315 

the lover supreme over the friend, even if at the 
end of the play he briefly and feebly tries to recon- 
cile love and friendship, the two colliding dramatic 
motives. He, the good-looking, well-mannered 
gentleman, endowed with all the magic of genius, 
finds himself the charmer of women and of men 
too; witty, overflowing with the poetry of speech 
in his common talk, conceivably sympathetic of 
look (the Italian simpatico), sinning indeed but 
also sinned against, fascinating but himself fas- 
cinated the more, he the victorious lover is bound 
to become the prey of love. Though all the Julias 
of London run after him in their disguise, and be- 
come his slaves, one of them, perchance just the 
most Protean female, will ensnare and enslave and 
fix fast our ever-shifting Proteus. But this his 
deepest experience will stir his genius from its last 
depths, and compel him to an enormous creation, 
for he, the poet, can only get relief from his heart- 
quakes through an ever-flowing musical self-ex- 
pression. Not without reason have some delving 
interpreters, doubtless themselves experienced o?. 
the same fact, found already in this play traces of 
the coming sinister Dark Lady, veiled in his 
Dramas, but unveiled in his Sonnets. 

IV. Let us note again the transition from the 
preceding Comedy of Errors to the present The 
Two Gentlemen of Verona, from outer Accident to 
inner Caprice, from an illusive objective sense- 
world to a changeful subjective love-world, from an 
external play of chances to an internal play of emo- 



316 SB AKESPE ABE'S LIFE-DBAMA 

tions. Both have the common dramatic frame- 
work of parallel characters : two sets of lovers here, 
two sets of mistakers there ; both seem a fixed 
mechanism of the movement of life's marionettes, 
though the one set appears moved from without, 
and the other from within. And especially let us 
not forget the transition from the Latinizing to the 
Italianizing dramatist. 

With this work, accordingly, Shakespeare starts 
the long love-line of characters, men and more dis- 
tinctively women, comic, tragic, tragi-comic, who 
move through his full-rounded Pan-drama till its 
finale. Herein lies his universal appeal, his world- 
note of popularity. Repeatedly in this play the 
key-word struck and made to vibrate through all 
these young hearts is love. Yet what the poet 
yearns to express remains still the inexpressible : 

Didst thou but know the inly touch of Love 
Thou wouldst as soon go kindle fire with snow 
As seek to quench the fire of Love with words. 

Just that inly touch of Love is what the poet has 
now experienced, and he will keep-on trying to word 
it through young-manhood, middle-age, to the verge 
of old-age. Observe that inly touch as distinct 
from other forms of Love; mark too the tender 
soulful adjective inly, now quite lost in English, 
though still heard and felt in the corresponding 
German innig. Even if it be spoken by a woman, 
Shakespeare has here given his experience (prob- 
ably just won) of Love the eternal, and he becomes 



TWO GENTLEMEN OF VEBONA 317 

not merely the lover, but the lover of Love and the 
immortal voice thereof; Phileros we may title him 
after the old Greek Mythus. 

I do not think that Julia has yet become the 
Dark Lady, certainly not the Darkest Lady of the 
Sonnets, as some have held. Still she bridges over 
an intermediate but probably unrequited heart- 
stroke, from which, however, the poet wins the un- 
forgetable experience of ''the inly touch of Love", 
and takes it along with himself till life 's ' ' cockshut 
time". 

On the whole, the highest characters in the play, 
the most constant, the most heroic, are the women, 
so that if titular justice were done, it should be 
called The Two Gentlewomen of Verona, since these 
are much worthier of the gentle title than the two 
Gentlemen of Verona, both of whom show them- 
selves faithless to Love, Proteus, most fickle of 
men, is traitor to his lady, ingrate to his friend, and 
liar to Thurio. And Valentine is ready to give up 
his loved one to his friend — a sacrifice friendship 
ought not to ask, still less to offer. Again Shake- 
speare is seen conceiving and constructing much 
better women than men. Why? Look back into 
his primal originating home-life, at whose center 
stood his woman of women, his mother. 

So those two Gentlewomen ought to have shown 
the door to those two Gentlemen at the end of the 
play, making it really a Love's Labor's Lost. You 
would have done so, even if the great dramatist 
not only spares but rewards those ungentlemanly 



318 SHAKESPE ABE'S LIFE-DEAMA. 

Gentlemen with the dearest prize of the human 
heart. I think that Shakespeare himself must have 
felt this awful discord in his music-forcing close, 
and have resolved to correct it in his next play, 
which is a real dramatic Love's Labor's Lost in 
name and action, though the love-lorn losers of 
Navarre are not half so deserving of an unhappy 
lot as the two happy Gentlemen of Verona. 

LOVE'S LABOR'S LOST 

First is to be stressed that the present play com- 
bines the two strains, pre-Italian and post-Italian, 
which we found separate in the two preceding 
plays, namely in The Comedy of Errors and in The 
Two Gentlemen of Verona. It should be here 
added that each of these productions seems to have 
been written during one mood of the poet, or at 
one gush of his creative energy, being quite homo- 
geneous throughout. That is, each of these dramas 
has its own uniform style and character, while 
Love's Labor's Lost is decidedly heterogeneous 
within itself, containing some of his earliest ven- 
tures along with his more mature work. 

In fact, the present comedy seems to have been 
used by the poet as a store-house or general reser- 
\oir into which he dumped a lot of miscellaneous 
compositions of very slight inner connection. It 
becomes a kind of dramatic curiosity-shop through 
which we wander curiously inspecting and testing 
all sorts of literary forms, since here we find folk- 



LOVE'S LABOB'S LOST 319 

songs, ballads, sonnets, doggerels, proverbs rhymed 
and unrhymed, as well as prose and blank verse, 
truly a museum of many-mooded effusions thrown 
into a drama. 

Correspondingly, as many different dates have 
been assigned to its origin as it has literary diversi- 
ties. Critics vary as to the time of its birth some 
eight or even ten years. Editor Richard Grant 
White says 1588, and not later; the other extreme 
may be taken to be the Quarto of 1598, whose title 
page affirms it to have been "newly corrected and 
augmented by W. Shakespeare ' ', wherein is implied 
that there was a previous edition or exemplar of it 
less correct and less complete. This evidence, good 
in itself, we are the more inclined to accept since 
the play shows marks of two very different recen- 
sions, the later one seemingly much more Italian- 
ized than the other in meter, style and spirit. Be- 
tween these two dates (1588-1598), quite every 
year has been pre-empted by some critic for the 
play's starting-point with equal proof and equal 
lack of proof. 

There is no doubt that such dispersion of critical 
opinion has its source and its image in the dis- 
I)ersion of the play itself. Now to our mind the 
best way of bringing some order into this chaos is 
to grasp fast the two cardinal divisions of it, the 
pre-Italian and post-Italian, both of which are very 
strikingly marked in the drama, showing an Eng- 
lish element and a Southern element, each of which, 
however, has its sub-divisions. 



320 SEAKESPE ABE'S LIFE-DBAMA. 

''On the whole the worst jumbled-up play in all 
Shakespeare", so the average reader impatiently 
exclaims as he seeks to find his way through this 
tangled mass of riotous imagination. The result 
is that the present work has gotten the bad name 
of being rather the most unreadable production of 
the poet, bringing often the ordinary honest ex- 
plorer to a full stop somewhere in the middle of its 
tropical wilderness. Not that it is Shakespeare's 
thinnest and feeblest piece, as is sometimes said ; on 
the contrary it is too luxuriant and overgrown in 
its way; very rich it is indeed, especially rich in 
chaos. But when we consider that it represents a 
phase or probably two (or more) coalescent phases 
of Shakespeare's own self which he has here pro- 
jected into writ, we again open the book, and the 
interest starts up afresh, as we strike a new trail 
of that elusive yet ever-evolving personality of the 
poet whose jungle-play this is, and whose jungle- 
mood it mirrors. Thus we begin again threading 
the tortuous maze eagerly with the best companion 
in the world, namely Shakespeare himself, who is 
really the clew of this whole dramatic labyrinth 
with its numerous little by-ways and dark pass- 
ages. Better perhaps than in any other work are 
we here led into and through all the capricious 
twists and turns of the poet's versatile and way- 
ward subjectivity. Still not planless by any means 
is the monstrosity, even as pre-historic Nature is 
not, and especially as pre-historic Shakespeare is 
not. 



LOVE'S LABOB'S LOST 321 

At what point, then, may one tackle the seem- 
ingly recalcitrant mass so as to penetrate the more 
easily to its order? It seems to ns that we can 
detect the play as a composite of several distinct 
stages, moods, experiences of its author : which 
diversity extends even to a difference of localities. 
These, as I trace them, may be counted four — 
Stratford, London, Italy, the Academe or Navarre. 

I. Stratford. Many reminders we catch of the 
school-boy in his home town. So it comes that 
there is one entire group which we may call the 
Stratford coterie — the schoolmaster Holofernes. 
the curate Sir Nathaniel, and the constable Dull — 
who are interwoven quite externally as a distinct 
thread into the play. They are portrayed as cari- 
catures, each in his own special field, but all are 
pedantic, conceited, yet small-minded, being 
sketched off rapidly with a dash of grotesquery. 
So we have first to catch the naughty boy Willie 
Shakespeare in his seat at school drawing satirical 
portraits of his teacher Holofernes, obeying not so 
much his pictorial as his dramatic impulse, which 
is his inborn gift. And here we have at least a 
reminiscence of that early skit. But who was the 
original? Surely not the London Italian Florio, 
as is often said. Then, which one of his three 
Stratford schoolmasters sits now as model? He 
cannot be definitely pointed out ; certainly it was 
not Simon Hunt, his long-time teacher and prob- 
able encourager ; I would vote for Thomas Jenkins, 
his last dominie whom he quit after a year's trial, 



322 SHAKESPEABE'S LIFE-DBAMA 

doubtless through some trouble or dissatisfaction. 
And Jenkins himself lost his position not long 
afterward. The curate or preacher with his scrip- 
tural name, Nathaniel, also belonged to that town- 
life, and the petty official Dull represents its Dog- 
berrydom, which Shakespeare has caricatured else- 
where (see for instance Much Ado ahout Nothing. 
Undoubtedly these three stock-characters are to 
be found on the stage long before Shakespeare; 
indeed in one form or other they may be picked 
out in every community — English, French, Ger- 
man, or even old heathen Greek, America knows 
them well in its villages; Abraham Lincoln's van- 
ished New Salem had them without caricature — the 
schoolmaster Mentor Graham famed along with his 
world-famous pupil, the town minister, and small 
officialdom. Shakespeare, the germinal dramatist 
of all time, had experienced this special trio of 
communal characters at home, though they are like- 
wise universal products of human society, and 
hence of its literature. It is well to observe that 
these three Stratfordites (as we may think them for 
the nonce) are marked off together by themselves 
m.ore pronouncedly than any other group of the 
play. They rise up almost like a second thought of 
the author, since they are not introduced into the 
action till it is more than half over, appearing first 
in the Fourth Act, Scene Second. It is true that 
constable Dull has at the start a little piece of busi- 
ness, which, however, may be a later interpolation 
At any rate our' Stratford group do not get fully 



LOVE'S LABOB'S LOST 323 

into the movement of the drama till the last Act, in 
which they occupy a pivotal place and perform 
their real function. Why such tardy use of them? 
The answer involves a new set of characters which 
we shall next consider. 

2. London. Only in the capital city could the 
poet have met with the second group composed of 
those foreign men — Don Armado, Moth, Costard, 
all of them nominally South Europeans, in contrast 
with the pure English Stratfordites. Don Armado 
is described in the play as "a Spaniard that keeps 
here in court, a phantasime (fantastic), a Monar- 
cho", which last epithet indentifies him with a 
well-known London eccentric of that time. In 
spite of chronology one cannot help putting him 
alongside of Don Quixote, Cervantes being Shake- 
speare's cotemporary. Don Armado is the military 
pedant, and in his way represents Spain, then the 
first war-making nation of Europe, which threat- 
ened Northern Protestant lands, especially Holland 
and England. Also his name and character con- 
nect him with the grandiose Spanish Armada 
(often called Armado) whose huge bellicose bubble 
dashed itself to pieces against Britain's ships and 
rocks in the poet's time. Moth, his minute page, 
whose little tongue slashes so keenly, is supposed 
to get his name from the French ambassador, La 
Mothe, a familiar figure at Elizabeth s court. Cos- 
tard is the French-sounding numskull, and seems 
to run on parallel lines of stupidity with Constable 
Dull, the dullard of the Stratford trio. To these 



324 SHAKESPE ABE'S LIFE-DBAMA. 

London foreigners must be added the female named 
Jaquinetta, an unsavory morsel, who could not on 
moral grounds be associated with those English up- 
holders of the Church, School, and Law in the 
paradisaical country town of Stratford. 

Much ingenious interpretation has been lavished 
upon Don Armado, who thus has shown the power 
of creating literature as well as laughter. His bom- 
bastic word-puffs, his Spanish Gongorism or Eng- 
lish Euphuism, are specially emphasized; in him 
Spain 's native grandiosity is burlesqued by its Eng- 
lish foe, here voiced by the dramatist. Moreover 
this group is introduced at the start of the play as 
a kind of travesty and anti-climax to the somewhat 
monastic lordly Academe, being parodied as the 
obverse very realistic side to that Platonic idealism. 

But when the poet proposed to give a dramatic 
presentation of the Nine Worthies as his finale, he 
found that the present London group were totally 
unfit for his plan; so he brought into his action 
somewhat abruptly his learned Stratford group of 
pedants to finish his work. Hence we find two sets 
of caricatures in his drama — that of pedantic eru- 
dition and that of pedantic militarism. In both 
groups our poet lets loose his Rabelaisian humor; 
one thinks that he at this time must have been 
looking into the great French caricaturist, to whom 
he alludes elsewhere. That striking name Holo- 
fernes as well as the character can be traced back 
to Gargantuan Rabelais, though Shakespeare knew 



LOVE'S LABOR'S LOST 325 

the pedant at first hand in Stratford. He must 
experience before he appropriates. 

3. Italy. Permeating this drama everywhere is 
felt a strong Italian influence, though there be in it 
no national representative of Italy. In fact its 
v/hole argument plays around the Italian Rena- 
scence in several of its phases, indicating how it 
affected Southern Europe as well as far away 
Northern England, and especially the renascent 
English poet Shakespeare. Already we have seen 
him satirize in this play its negative side of hollow 
pedantry ; but he will also manifest its positive side, 
particularly in its poetic overflow. 

In fact we may hear a personal undertone of the 
poet's own experience in his admiration of Venice 
v/hose proverbial praise he cites in the original (as 
corrected by Theobald) : Yinegia, Vinegia, chi non 
te vede, ei non te pregia. Venice, Venice, who 
lias not seen tkee, prizes thee not. A little exuber- 
ance of Shakespeare's own heart as he recalls the 
Italian sea-city we may well note here, being a kind 
of prelude to what he will do with it in Merchant of 
Venice and in Othello, and possibly in Measure for 
Measure, whose Vienna seems at some points to be a 
sort of mask for Venice. For in these three future 
plays he appears to commune directly with the in- 
most Venetian city-soul, and to re-create its pe- 
culiar atmosphere in speech, which could hardly be 
achieved except by immediate personal vision and 
appropriation. Do we not go to Shakespeare still 



326 SHAKESPE ABE'S LIFE-DBAMA 

to catch the spirit of Venice in words, as we seek 
its expression in color by viewing the works of 
Titian and of Tintoretto, and of her other great 
painters ? And is it pushing too far when we think 
to hearken in his foregoing praise of Venice the 
poet's own confession, that he must directly and 
sensibly see the wonderful city in order to appre- 
ciate and then reproduce its elusive soul-life? 
Surely he has first to experience Venice before he 
can realize it dramatically — which means the trip 
to Italy. 

But that which chiefly conjoins Shakespeare to 
Italy is the poetry of the Italian Renascence, with 
its love rhymes, and especially with its sonnets, of 
which a number are interspersed throughout the 
present action. So it comes that the work before 
us specially interlinks with the total Shakespearian 
sonnet-sequence far more deeply than any other 
play ; in fact this Italian strain of it has a tendency 
to pitch over into mere sonneting at various points. 
Still it represents only one phase or period of all 
the sonnets, which are a kind of diary of Shake- 
speare's whole poetic career. For his sonnets mir- 
ror the personal counterpart of the comic, tragic, 
and redeinptive stages of his entire Life-drama. 
Also the Dark Lady now definitely appears — the 
real heroine of the Sonneteer, though there may 
be besides her two or three lesser female person- 
alities. 

4. Navarre, or The Academe. For some reason 
the poet now shuns local Italy, in spite of the 



LOVE'S LABOE'S LOST 327 

play's Italianized poetry, culture, and general at- 
mosphere, and he throws his scene into Navarre 
which is situated chiefly in the South of France 
and extends into Spain. We might think him 
dallying over the old Provencal love-world with its 
troubadours, but it can hardly be dug out of any 
intimations here. Accordingly we may suppose 
that the poet took a dramatic advantage of the 
great English interest in Henry TV, King of Na- 
varre, and the Protestant hero of France, who won 
the battle of Ivry in 1590 over his Catholic foes, 
8,nd whose name and deed are still known and de- 
claimed by the school-boys of Anglo-Saxondom, 
rehearsing young Macaulay 's spirited verses : 

Now glory to the Lord of Hosts from whom 

all glories are .... 
Hurrah ! hurrah ! for Ivry and King Henry 

of Navarre. 

Queen Elizabeth is said to have sent 4000 soldiers 
to help the Protestant French king, who three years 
later turned Catholic (1593) about the time of 
Shakespeare's visit to Italy, probably by way of 
France and possibly of Navarre. But the poet 
avoids any notice of the religious conflict, in ac- 
cord with his habit of shunning the great Catholic- 
Protestant strife of the age, with two or three pos- 
sible exceptions. On the contrary he makes his 
theme wholly secular and cultural. Says the King 
here: 



328 SHAKESPE ABE'S LIFE-DBAMA 

Navarre shall be the wonder of the world, 
Our court shall be a little Academe, 
Still and contemplative in living art. 

The answer of one of these associated philosophers 
may be taken as typical of all of them : 

To love, to wealth, to pomp, I pine and die. 
With all these living in philosophy. 

Religion thus has no direct part in this ''New 
Life", which hints a prevalent dream of the Renas- 
cence to re-establish the old Platonic School of 
Athens, whereof an example was famously given by 
the Florentine Academy established about 1540, 
and much reputed at the time of Shakespeare's 
visit to Italy. The dream of the King of Navarre 
is to turn his state into a kind of Platonopolis, an 
institution which the philosopher Plotinus once 
thought of creating as the realisation of Plato's 
ideal Republic, and which was to be ruled by phi- 
losophers. Here we may add that Shakespeare 
shows his Platonic bent and study in a number of 
sonnets, for Platonism was a learned fashion or 
freak of the time, also chiefly imported from Italy. 
In fact the claim has been made that our poet 
somehow got tinctured with the philosophy of 
Giordano Bruno, who was burned for heresy in 
1600 at Rome. 

From this point of view Love's Labor's Lost gives 
many interesting glimpses of Shakepeare's eager 
learnings and imaginings during the present Epoch. 



LOVE'S LABOR'S LOST 329 

Nor does he fail to acknowledge his deeper motive 
as voiced by the King : 

Let fame, that all hunt after in their lives 
Live registered upon our brazen tombs . . . 
And make us heirs of all eternity. 

But now appears a mightier power than Lore, even 
than Fame the eternizer, namely Love, most beau- 
tifully and indeed irresistibly incorporate in the 
Princess of France and her three grand Ladies, 
who proceed at once to storm and to capture the 
celibate fortress of Philosophy, whose once defiant 
inmates they subject to their loveless ordinances. 

Let it also be noted that here Shakespeare shad- 
ows forth his own experience, for all through his 
Italianizing sonnets and dramas and epics runs the 
over-mastering might of Love. And the Renascence 
as a whole, with all its erudite classicism and phi- 
losophy, utters its deepest and realest self in the 
amatory strains of its poets and novelists; over- 
much religion it was not afflicted with. The "World - 
Spirit then indwelling Italy was in love; Shake- 
speare's genius, originally love's own, became im- 
pregnated with its Italian expression there, and 
brought the same home to his England. 

We feel more reconciled to the hodge-podge of 
Love's Labor's Lost, when we find that its scat- 
tered dramatic protoplasm contains a greater num- 
ber of germs of the coming Shakespeare than any 
other drama under his name. It overspans a large 
fragment of his early creative life, being almost a 



330 SEAKESPE ABE'S LIFE-DBAMA. 

complete treatise of Shakespearian embryology. 
To discern these motes, you have to use your mi- 
croscope, and furthermore to put in order their 
atomic sport ; if you are averse to that instrument, 
as many are, you had better leave this play to one 
side. It has a unique bent of turning to a sonnet- 
drama, and therein connects with the poet's long 
sonnet-sequence, and also with A Lover's Com- 
plaint, as already noticed. His delight in Italy, 
especially in Venice is marked; at the same time 
his passion brealcs out for the Dark Lady, whose 
name is here Eosaline, whom he also glimpsed in 
Romeo and Juliet. Quite similar are these two 
portraits in a number of features, especially in 
beauty's haughty disdain for her lover, be he 
Eomeo, or Biron, or Shakespeare, or all three in 
one. A great evolution lies in this love of Rosaline 
as it keeps unfolding and expressing itself in the 
poet's Life-drama, whose other side or subjective 
underworld it reveals, sometimes sunlit, oftener 
clouded. 

It is reasonable to infer that Shakespeare re- 
garded this singular work of his pen with a per- 
sonal favor, since he took the trouble to make a 
"newly corrected and augmented" copy of it for 
the printer : such is the fact indicated on the title- 
page of the Quarto published in 1598. In like 
manner it is stated that the Quarto of Romeo and 
Juliet was "newly corrected, augmented and 
amended" for publication the next year, 1599. 
Still further, the second Quarto of Hamlet (1604) 



LOVE'S LABOB'S LOST 331 

is also ''newly imprinted and enlarged to almost as 
much again as it was". These three documented 
facts cause us to infer that Shakespeare has won 
his reading-public, and does not propose to confine 
his genius to the play-house. The test has been 
fully made; his vaster constituency of readers has 
already risen upon his outlook. 

Over and over again in this play, as well as else- 
where the poet has suggested his own psychology 
and poetic first principle: the immediate experi- 
ence of the object, while erudition or transmitted 
lore is but an aid at best : 

Learning is but an adjunct to ourself 
And where we are, our learning likewise is : 

In fact Love's Labor's Lost often vents a strong 
reaction against the crammed traditional education 
in favor of the original spontaneous self, which is 
here manifested in youth's primordial love of 
woman : 

From woman's eyes this doctrine I derive 
They are the ground, the books, the Academes, 
From whence doth spring the true Promethean 
fire, 

that is, the fire of creation, especially the poetic, 
re-enacting that story of old Prometheus, the man- 
former : 

Never durst poet touch a pen to write 

Until his ink were tempered with Love 's sighs. 



332 SB ARE SPE ABE'S LIFE-DBAMA. 

Thus Shakespeare as Biron cenfesses all the varie- 
ties and tortuosities of his new experience, giving 
quite a full psychology of his Ego, now under the 
goad of his true Promethean love which will drive 
him to a fresh world-creation. 

Schoolmaster Holofernes does not like the new- 
fangled Italian poetry, so he is introduced criticiz- 
ing the sonnet and belittling its worth in compari- 
son with the grand classic example glorified in his 
shout of admiration: ''Ovidius Naso was the 
man", and not your Italy's poetasters; that is, 
Ovid was the poetic darling of the Stratford 
School. Such is the pre-Italian note of the old 
pedagogue, whose limited lore young Shakespeare 
shows himself to have far transcended in the pres- 
ent drama. 

III. Histories of the Present Epoch. We have 
now reached the national portion of the Shake- 
spearian Pan-drama, those plays listed simply as 
Histories in the First Folio, ten of them as there 
set down. This dramatic form is in origin the most 
English of all the work of Shakespeare, who here 
dramatizes the History of his nation after a model 
which his nation has evolved, and which he carries 
up to the highest perfection. Thus he found it 
already existent but germinal, and he fulfilled it 
"with his genius. 

The two preceding kinds of drama are not of 
English descent either in form or matter ; Tragedy 
and Comedy go back to the old classic world for 
their starting-point in Shakespeare, however much 



LOVE'S LABOR'S LOST 333 

they get transformed under his hand. Hence they 
are far more imitated or derived from the outside 
than his History, which both in form and content 
is native to the English soil, even if hints of it 
may be found in antiquity. So we behold the poet 
even in this far-outreaching experimental Epoch 
cling to his own folk's art-form. 

Moreover his present stage of writing poetic His- 
tory simply continues what he has begun in his 
Collaborative Epoch, the time of his Yorkian 
Tetralogy, which has been already set forth as the 
beginning of his dramatic authorship. Indeed his 
experience with that stormily tragic age of the 
Roses made him go back and dramatize its earliest 
source, in the reign of Richard II. The poet now 
becomes the patriot, voicing his people's deepest 
political consciousness, and composing what has 
been called the grand dramatic Epos of English 
nationality. 

Of these Histories we conceive two, King John 
and Richard II, to have been composed during the 
present Epoch. Again there is no exact proof for 
the dates of these plays, and hen.ce comes great 
diversity of critical opinion upon this subject. In 
this chronological chaos we discern a single steady 
light-point: one of these Histories, King John, 
shows itself written before Shakespeare's visit to 
Italy, hence we may rank it as pre-Italian; while 
the other, Richard II, has not a few marks of Italy's 
influence upon the poet. 



334 SRAKESFEAEE'S LIFE-DBAMA. 

KING JOHN. 

Some commentators place the birth of Shake- 
speare's King John, after that of his Richard II, 
without proof or good reason we think; besides, 
such an order violates the historic time-sequence 
of the two plays. But the deeper ground is that 
King John, in subject and in style, in wording and 
especially in English patriotism, is closely related 
to the poet's earlier Histories, the Yorkian group. 
Still further, one who listens intently, can still 
hear in it the buoyant echoes of Queen Elizabeth's 
recent triumph over Spain, and the national glorifi- 
cation after the defeat of the Spanish Armada — a 
mood which cannot be discerned in the previous 
four Histories. 

Hence it comes that we feel in this play a lurking 
antagonism to the Southern or Latin world, espe- 
cially as regards its two institutions. Church and 
State. England has rejected both, even with sword 
in hand, and her poet now celebrates the great in- 
stitutional separation of Anglo-Saxondom from the 
Mediterranean system both ecclesiastical and po- 
litical — the consummation of Elizabeth's reign 
Hence we assign this drama to Shakespeare's pre- 
Italian time and mood, from which we shall find 
him strongly re-acting after his visit to Italy. 

Such is the spirit of the present play, which we 
may hearken in the words of its English hero Fal- 
conbridge, especially when he ridicules the foreign 
traveler as "my picked man of countries" 



KING JOHN 335 

And talking of the Alps and Appenines, 
The Pyrenean and the river Po. 

With like purpose, though with a different manner, 
the King himself (John) in his earlier more Eng- 
lish period denounces the ' ' Italian priest ' ' in Eng- 
land, and even defies the Church's head 

Yet I alone, alone do me oppose «■ 

Against the Pope, and count his friends my 
foes- — 

which challenge was certainly Elizabeth's, if not 
John 's. Later we shall find Shakespeare modifying 
his tone, particularly about travel, after that he 
has himself been a traveler in Italy. His praise 
of it we have already quoted in The Two Gentle- 
men of Verona, a production of his post-Italian 
time. 

King John Bull this play might be sur-named, 
for it is more rampantly patriotic, more Anglo- 
maniacal than any other work of Shakespeare, 
though most of his Histories are strongly relished 
with Englishism. That does not hurt them, to our 
taste; rather is it just what we should expect and 
even wish for in the present dramatic species. Ac- 
cordingly in this play, which voices the prologue 
chronological of the poet's grand English-historical 
Pan-drama consisting of the ten dramas or so- 
called Histories from King John to Henry VIII 
inclusive, we hear the key-note loudly and per- 
vasively intoned, namely nationalism and just 
about the Englishest nationalism possible. 



336 SBAKESPE ABE'S LIFE-DRAMA. 

Now it is of significance to note that our poet 
has had to evolve into this intensity of national 
feeling through his art. The composition of the 
Yorkian Tetralogy lies already behind him (Rich- 
ard III and the three Parts of Henry VI) as has 
been just set forth. Hence in the line of his own 
dramatic evolution, King John is his fifth and pos- 
sibly his seventh effort in the production of English 
Histories, and thus touches the center of the entire 
series. But it is placed first according to the strict 
chronological succession, which is the order of the 
First Folio and of nearly all editions printed since. 
On account of this earliest arrangement, which de- 
rives doubtless from Shakespeare himself, he must 
have regarded the ten dramas of English History as 
one great artistic Whole, the supreme oblation of 
his genius to his country. On the other hand, in 
the Shakespearian Life-drama, which is now our 
theme emphatically pushed to the fore, King John 
is interlinked in the dramatic chain after Richard 
III, and betrays still an imitative undertone of the 
master, Marlowe. Looking backward as well as 
peering forward, the poet has here reached a dis- 
tinct conscious conception of his English Historical 
Series, which is, of course, still to be wrought out 
to its completeness in his future years by the addi- 
tion of five more of these Histories. 

Accordingly in the present drama he has intro- 
duced a character whose chief function is to pro- 
claim the new national spirit, which really belongs 
not so much to King John's old time nearly four 



KING JOHN 337 

centuries agone, as to Queen Elizabeth's, just now 
being houred on the horologue of History. This is 
Falconbridge whose closing speech of the play 
might be taken as the motto for it at the start as 
well as for the whole English -historical series: 

This England never did nor never shall 

Lie at the proud foot of a conqueror 

But when it first did help to wound itself. 

These lines suggest the difference between the two 
Englands — the former humiliated, self-wounding 
England, of the warring Roses, and the present 
united, exalted England now gloriously triumphant 
over the Spanish Armada, which also menaced both 
State and Religion. Accordingly the poet intro- 
duces and stresses the attack on the independence 
of the English Nation and Church, not from Spain, 
indeed, but from Prance, another Latin people 
supported by the Papacy. Still the inner national 
conflict of King John was the same as that of the 
poet's age, and his Elizabethan audience could not 
help responding to this conflict as its own recent 
battle. 

Moreover Shakespeare had passed through what 
he here describes. The Queen was excommuni- 
cated by the Pope, conspirators had sought to 
assassinate her at home, foreign nations threatened 
her crown from abroad, religious disputes kept wax- 
ing hotter throughout her realm. The English 
folk-soul was in mighty turmoil and upheaval from 
its depths: it was digging up and revaluing its 



338 SHAKESPE ABE'S LIFE-DEAMA. 

old transmitted institutions, especially those of 
government and religion. This younger experience 
of his the poet has set forth in those deeply turbu- 
lent plays of national unrest, which make up his 
Henry VI, whose violent form reflects their violent 
time as well as their violent characters. But also 
they hold the mirror up to the earlier years of 
Elizabeth 's reign, whereof Shakespeare had experi- 
enced somewhat, making him feel profoundly the 
national bane of all these dynastic strifes. In fact 
Shakespeare-Falconbridge in a lofty flight of rap- 
ture seems to prophesy the ultimate decline and 
cessation of royalty itself through its own inherent 
self-destruction. In these our days of sunken ma- 
jesties the passage stirs wonderment : 

Now for the bare-picked bone of majesty 
Doth dogged war bristle his angry crest, 
And snarleth in the gentle eyes of peace; 
Now powers from home and discontents at home 
Meet in one line ; and vast confusion waits, 
As doth a raven on a sick fallen beast. 
The imminent decay of wrested pomp. 

Some such fulfilment we have just witnessed to- 
day through Europe's World-War. But thus at 
the end of his Fourth Act our poet-prophet in far- 
off foreboding broods over the fall of kingship. 
Mark now the sudden change: in the following 
Fifth Act a new spirit rises and speaks through 
Fauleonbridge : 



KING JOHN 339 

But wherefore do you droop ? why look you sad ? 
Let not the world see fear and sad distrust 
Govern the motion of a kingly eye — 
Be great in act — be stirring as the time — 
The dauntless spirit of resolution. 

In these words we may well hear the voice of the 
rising national will which is to make no compro- 
mise, no "base truce to arms invasive" like those 
of Spain. Old King John can now be ' ' poisoned by 
a monk" and gotten out of the way, for the new 
King John Bull is in the saddle personated by 
Faulconbridge. And the English people under 
Elizabeth has made the transition from a time of 
inner scission and distraction to a time of national 
unity and of fresh creative power, now uttered by 
Shakespeare, its greatest incarnation. 

Such is, to our feeling, the dominant personal 
note in the present play, the poet's high-wroug?it 
paean celebrating his nation's victory over the 
Southern or the Latin assault upon the rising 
Anglo-Saxon world in the North. Somewhat of this 
oldest and deepest European struggle, that orig- 
inally between Roma and Teutonia, sends an occa- 
sional underbreath, which may be heard in the 
defiance : 

from the mouth of England 
Add this much more — that no Italian priest 
Shall tithe or toll in our dominions. 

There is another very intimate gush from Shake- 
speare 's own heart in this play: the lament of 



340 SHAKESPE ABE'S LIFE-DEAMA. 

Constance the mother over the loss of her son's 
future prospect of greatness. The youth Shake- 
speare, when he married Anne Hathaway, must 
have heard similar words from his proud, soul- 
stricken mother so ambitious for her boy whose 
considerate but anxious answer we may catch in 
that of Arthur: 

I do beseech you, Madam, be content. 

The maternal pride of Mary Arden Shakespeare in 
its deep disappointment may have been capable of 
suggesting even the passionate words of Constance 
over her son: 

But thou art fair, and at thy birth, dear boy. 
Nature and Fortune joined to make thee great; 
Of Nature's gifts thou mayst with lilies boast 
And with the half -blown rose. But Fortune, 
She is corrupted, changed and won from thee — 

Of course the outer events in the two eases do not 
tally, but the inner flow of the mother-soul is quite 
the same in kind, being caused bj^ a like defeat of 
lofty maternal hope. Constance is indeed a char- 
acter which distinctly lies outside and beyond the 
range of Marlowe both in conception and utterance, 
even when she uses her strongest power-words, as 

that my tongue were in the thunder's mouth, 
Then with a passion I would shake the world. 

Still there are some passages in this play where 
we can detect the influence of the poet's great 



KING JOHN 341 

teacher. Even the child Arthur mid his most af- 
fecting prattle mounts now and then into the high 
stilts of Marlowese, as when he speaks of the hot 
iron which is to burn out his eyes "in this iron 
age": 

The iron of itself though heat red-hot, 
Approaching near these eyes, would drink 

my tears 
And quench his fiery indignation 
Even in the matter of mine innocence. 
Nay, after that consume away in rust — 

which would sound very maturely bombastic and 
subtly far-fetched in a full-grown man. In fact 
Hubert's talk is simpler and more child-like than 
Arthur's in this famous scene, whose overwhelm- 
ing dramatic power Shakespeare derived from the 
old play which he appropriated and transfigured, 
as usual. This old play was named ' ' The Trouble- 
some Raigne of John, King of England", and was 
printed in 1591, which year is not far from the 
date of its reconstruction by Shakespeare, who 
must have known it before as a stage-piece, and 
have ruminated over its fresh redaction in accord 
with his new poetic principle. Shakespeare's own 
play of King John was not published till the Folio 
of 1623, where it stands first of the second division 
entitled Histories, to which it was evidently con- 
ceived as the overture. Thus the time of its com- 
position is purely conjectural, and has been varied 
much by various expositors for a variety of rea- 



342 SHAKESPE ABE'S LIFE-DEAMA 

sons. A number of writers headed by Richard 
Grant White have fixed on the year 1596, m order 
to make the date of the play cotemporaneous with 
the death of the poet's young son Hamnet, for 
whom the bereaved mother Constance's heart- 
rending lamentations are supposed to be the 
father's own for his dead boy: 

Therefore never, never, never 
Must I behold my pretty Arthur more — 
Grief fills the room up of my absent child, 
Lies in his bed, walks up and down with me, 
Puts on his pretty looks, repeats his works. 
Remembers me of all his gracious parts. 
Stuffs out his vacant garments with his form : 

all of which throbs straight from personal experi- 
ence and may have been a later insertion. But the 
drift of the play as a whole reaches back to the 
early nineties of the sixteenth century, years be- 
fore the passing of Hamnet, and is certainly not 
attuned in its fundamental keynote to a dirge of 
domestic sorrow. 

The frequent military and naval terms seem to 
waft a recent reminiscence of war through the 
drama. Who can even to-day help thinking of the 
defeat of the Armada in this piece of news brought 
by a messenger of the King : 

Be of good comfort, for the great supply 
That was expected by the Dauphin here 
Are wrecked three nights ago on Goodwin 
S-ands — 



KING JOHN 343 

where part of the Spanish fleet perished in a storm. 
Only some few years before this play's time, Wil- 
liam Shakespeare must have heard a similar an- 
nouncement made to the people of England, which 
still has its appeal to Anglo-Saxondom. 

The underlying theme of the drama we thus in- 
terweave with the poet's own time and life. Two 
characters especially, Faulconbridge and Constance 
are deeply tinged with his personal experience and 
receive direct draughts from his purest effluence of 
genius. With this finest gold is mingled a good 
deal of foreign material not yet fully fused into his 
art- work ; no little formalism, imitation, undigested 
tradition still muddies the crystal stream of his 
originality. Nevertheless we can see the distinctive 
Shakespeare here as the right dramatist, as the 
masker and incarnator of his own innermost Self 
into divers acting individualities. 

Still to-day, looking back at the recent World- 
War, we may hear throughout this play the pro- 
phetic note which rings so resolutely in the will- 
fraught lines: 

This England never did nor never shall 
Lie at the proud foot of a conqueror. 

Such was the poet 's rapturous forecast of his coun- 
try uttered more than three centuries ago ; but in 
these last years a far more desperate trial England 
has undergone than that of those old wars — French 
and Spanish — with the same final victorious out- 
come, however. Hence this drama of King John 



344 SHAKESPEARE'S LIFE-DBAMA 

has for to-day's reader a strangely new presaging 
voice ,which our time hearkens out of it every- 
where. Yet with one astonishing change: her foe 
is not now the South but the North, not the Latin 
but the German, not Roma but Teutonia. A grand 
new shifting scene of the World's History: what 
can it mean? 

But in the life of the poet behold the sudden 
metamorphosis ! Watch him as he attunes himself 
anew, turning from his strongly Anglicised to his 
sweetly Italianized strain, not only in his one drama 
but in his Life-drama. 

KING RICHARD IL 

Here is not only the right chronological, but the 
fitting biographical place of the present play, which 
along with King John represents two successive 
phases of the poet's biography — phases which ap- 
pertain to this same second Epoch, imitative, tenta- 
tive, limit-overreaching. Shakespeare still follows 
the transmitted model of the English History dra- 
matized, the present being his sixth (possibly his 
eighth) attempt in this species. And we still trace 
the influence of his master Marlowe at several dif- 
ferent points, one of which we may here premise: 
probably Marlowe's last play is his Edward II, in 
rivalry with which Shakespeare from certain sim- 
ilarities seems to have composed his Richard II. 

Still for us the distinctive literary fact of this 
present play is its Italian mood, feeling, poetic 



KING BICEAED 345 

fragrance; its style is softer, sweeter, weaker than 
that of King John, which has in it, especially in the 
first half, a right strong display of English will- 
power and word-energy. Accordingly Shakespeare 
interweaves here a strain of his spirit's Italy, and 
Richard II Italianizes himself in the course of the 
drama through his peculiar artistic temperament. 
Although on the throne of England, he appears 
like one of those petty Italian tyrants of the Rena- 
scence, ready to assassinate his own kin by hired 
dagger or secret poison, ruled by his favorites, and 
utterly regardless of all private and public right. 
Still such a tyrant could be and often was a de- 
voted patron of the Fine Arts, in which Italy was 
supreme ; yea, he could be an artist also as well as 
a right artistic object in himself. Some such crea- 
ture seems to us this King Richard, a beautiful 
youth always in the play, however old he may be; 
often a tender emotional soul interlaid with streaks 
of remorseless cruelty. But especially was he en- 
dowed with an unique poetic gift which radiates 
shining verses like sunbeams from old Sol, corus- 
cating the brighter as he sinks toward his setting. 

What could have turned Shakespeare to portray- 
ing such a character, quite singular among all his 
dramatic personages? We believe that it is one of 
the fruits of his Italian journey, a dramatic picture 
drawn from his immediate observation of the fact 
at first hand. For Richard II is not a thorough- 
bred Englishman, though he be here Englished by 
the English poet who, however, has the creative 



346 SHAKESPE ABE'S LIFE-DBAMA. 

power of transfiguring his own particular form of 
nationalism into quite its opposite. It is true that 
very little is said about Italy in this drama. Still 
that old-timer York vents his complaints against 
the King's un-English love of foreign manners, art, 
and poetry, lamenting that Richard is altogether 
too fond of 

Lascivious meters, to whose venom sound 
The open ear of youth doth always listen; 
Report of fashions in proud Italy 
Whose manners still our tardy-apish nation 
Limps after in base imitation. 

Here the open charge is that Richard is Italianiz- 
ing, against which tendency has evidently risen a 
strong national protest, which Shakespeare has 
heard and here expresses. 

One void in Richard 's soul is specially noticeable : 
it is his total lack of conscience which is so prom- 
inent in other plays, markedly in Richard HI. No 
contrition, no repentance, no reaction of the spirit 
against his guilty deeds can we trace in Richard II. 
When told that he must confess "the grievous 
crimes committed by your person and your fol- 
lowers", he questions ''must I do so? and must I 
ravel out my weaved-up follies?" He refuses, de- 
fends himself, showing that confession is not a part 
of his make-up, that he really lacks the sense of 
guilt, that he as annointed king can do no wrong. 
One can hardly help thinking of Machiavelli, whose 
reputation was at its bloom when Shakespeare saw 



KING EICEAED 347 

Italy. Indeed the poet must have known some- 
what of that diabolic Florentine counselor of 
princely iniquity before his trip, for he makes 
Gloster (afterwards Richard III) boast the ability 
to give a lesson to ''the murderous Machiavel" in 
cunning and cruelty (III Henry VI. 3. 2.) 

I can add colors to the chameleon, 
Change shapes with Proteus for advantages, 
And set the murderous Machiavel to school. 

How familiar the name and character of this 
Italian writer must have been, if not to an Englisli 
audience, at least to the poet, may be inferred from 
the fact that mine unlettered host of Garter in 
Merry Wives makes the to us learned allusion: 
"Am I politic? Am I subtle? Am I Machiavel?" 
Where did Shakespeare pick up the knowledge of 
Machiavelli ? Did he ever read the latter 's Prince ? 
For he has certainly caught somewhence the drift 
of that famous book which mirrors renascent Italy's 
political character, whereof the dramatist embodies 
a leading strain in this King Richard II, who, with 
his highly developed Esthetic and very deficient 
Ethic, incarnates strikingly the Italian Renascence 
both in its worth and in its unworth. 

A number of indirect echoes of the poet's trip 
abroad may be heard in the present drama. For 
instance, we can feel Shakespeare's own loss of his 
native tongue when he touches foreign lands, in the 
deeply throbbed wail of banished Norfolk: 



348 SHAKESPEARE'S LIFE-DBAMA. 

The language I have learned these forty years, 

My native English, now I must forego. 

And now my tongue 's use is to me no more 

Than an unstringed viol or a harp, 

Or like a cunning instrument cased up ; — 

And dull, unfeeling, barren ignorance 

Is made my jailor to attend on me. 

Such a strain was attuned after the poet's own ex- 
perience when on leaving England he found amid a 
strange folk his supreme gift of self-expression 
utterly useless and nullified; for what is Shake- 
speare without his language? Such is the heart- 
felt note of personal loss here intoned — the greatest 
of all possible losses, unless he overcomes it by talk- 
ing to himself and fetching back home that English 
speech of his, rather the best of human vocabu- 
laries. The word-loving banished Norfolk now 
drops out of the play till we learn of his death, 
which overtook him after being a crusader 

Streaming the ensign of the Christian cross 
Against black pagans, Turks and Saracens ; 
And, toiled with works of war, retired himself 
To Italy ; and there at Venice gave 
His body to that pleasant country's earth — 

which passage, really lacking any connection with 
the dramatic argument, seems here interpolated as 
an exalted reminiscence of the poet's Italian jour- 
ney, whose most radiant light-point for him was 
Venice, of course. 



KING BICEABD 349 

The eulogy on England's worth and glory, which 
culminates in the dying words of John of Gaunt 
appears chiefly directed against the Italianizing 
tendency of his nephew the King: 

This royal throne of kings, this sceptred isle, 
This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars, 
This other Eden, demi -paradise, 
This fortress built by Nature for herself. 
This happy breed of men, this little world 
This precious stone set in the silver sea — 

namely this England, far superior to other lands 
even to beautiful Italy, is now disgraced and un- 
done by its sovereign through his un-English con- 
duct and spirit. Such is one among numerous 
signs of an anti-foreign nativistic trend in this 
drama and in its Elizabethan time. And, the exiled 
Bolingbroke, who is the coming Henry IV, stresses 
his pro-English character in seeming contrast with 
the unnational King Richard rhyming his patriotic 
refrain : 

Where'er I wander, boast of this I can 
Though banished, yet a true-born Englishman. 

The source-searching student will not fail to read 
the prose account of Richard's reign in the old 
chronicler Holinshed, from whom Shakespeare took 
his story almost bodily. The events, the person- 
ages, the purely historic elements are quite the 
same — yet what a difference! Holinshed has no 
Italianizing Richard, who is just the supreme poetic 



350 SHAKESPE ABE'S LIFE-DBAMA. 

achievement, really Shakespeare's own living self 
interwrought with long-agone dead history. Watch 
again the marvelous metamorphosis of prose into 
poetry : 

Nothing of him that doth fade 
But doth suffer a sea-change 
Into something rich and strange. 

This is the only play of Shakespeare in which the 
female is practically left out, perhaps because 
Richard himself is the woman of it to a sufficiency, 
being very emotional and subjective, yet full of 
presentiment and even prophecy. And so the all- 
lover Shakespeare can write a drama without any 
love in it. To be sure Richard has a very affection- 
ate Queen, but she is by him neglected and indeed 
negligible. Sensuous, self-indulgent, when misfor- 
tune strikes him he responds with his soul 's music, 
like a stricken stringed instrument. I believe that 
Shakespeare was deeply sympathetic with this 
unique creation of his genius, giving therein gleams 
of his own self-expression, for it was the blow of 
fate that made him too a poet. Also he was pas- 
sionately enamored of renascent Italy, but he evi- 
dently saw its political and ethical limitations, 
while he imbibed lastingly of its art and poetry. 
Richard II is an Italian tyrant of the Renascence 
set on the throne of England with the tragic con- 
sequences thereof to himself, through which he scin- 
tillates as a poet, exquisitely glowing down to a 
dying iridescence. Life has hitherto been one long 
illusion, so he exhorts himself 



KING BICHASD 35;! 

To think our former state a happy dream, 

from which awakes now our grand disillusion. 

In all this diapason of tuneful sorrows there can 
be heard no real note of penitence, of a conscience- 
troubled heart ; it simply attunes us to the pensive 
mood of nature as when we view a gorgeously van- 
ishing sunset. But his rival Lancaster who has de- 
throned and undone his king, feels at once the back- 
stroke of conscience in the deed of guilt, and ex- 
claims to his accomplice 

The guilt of conscience take thou for thy labor, 
With Cain go wander through the shades of 

night, 
Lords, I protest, my soul is full of woe — 
I '11 make a voyage to the Holy Land, 
To wash this blood off from my guilty hand. 

"Wherein we may well hear the moral difference not 
only between Italianizing Richard and Anglicizing 
Henry, but also between the Northern Reformation 
and the Southern Renascence. 

Queen Elizabeth, who also had a decided vein of 
the Renascence in her cultural make-up, is said not 
to have liked this History of Richard II, perhaps 
as holding the mirror up to nature with too much 
fidelity. Especially the scene of the sovereign's 
dethronement seems to have been distasteful to her, 
for she knew herself giving quite similar provoca- 
tion, which was followed by similar conspiracy 
against her throne, though unsuccessful. So it 
comes that only in the third Quarto printed in 



352 SHAKESPE ABE'S LIFE-DBAMA. 

1608 after her death, was the excided deposition of 
King Richard (Act IV. sc 1), a large toll of a hun- 
dred and sixty four lines, restored to its original 
place in the drama. In the two previous Quartos 
of 1597 and 1598, her censor had evidently cut out 
the offensive passage, which seems not to have dis- 
turbed the equanimity of her successor. King 
James. Perhaps here lay one reason why Shake- 
speare was not all-too-fond of Queen Elizabeth. 

Underneath its dainty imaginative sport, there 
runs a profound institutional meaning through this 
play—nothing less than the problem of political 
revolution, when right and when wrong. But now 
the Italian-minded King is gone, and the English- 
minded King has usurped his throne, whereupon 
the fates of History take a fresh tarn, and a new 
Epoch opens with a new Monarch. 

Retrospect. Here ends the present Epoch, last- 
ing some five or six years, of Shakespeare's life, 
with its exceedingly diversified content, which is 
made up of many poetic experiments, not only dra- 
matic but also epic and lyric. Now from this 
bound-bursting expansion on the one hand follows 
a time of equally decided concentration on the 
other, in which he confines himself to his one lit- 
erary form, the drama — and even of this he em- 
ploys not every species, as we shall note more fully 
later. 

But here the student of the poet, looking back- 
wards, is to hold this Second Epoch singly before 
bis mind, and to ask what may it signify in itself, 



KING BICHABD 353 

and what function can it perform in Shakespeare 's 
total Life-drama? The young poet at present 
drives outward, will enlarge his previous narrow 
horizons, in fact he starts to universalize himself 
in the culture of his art which is poetry. If his 
previous Epoch (Collaboration) is his primary 
schooling in his vocation's grand discipline, the 
present Epoch may be deemed his University train- 
ing. Not that he goes to Oxford or Cambridge, 
which would probably have ruined his career, but 
to the University of Civilisation, as this has ex- 
pressed itself in the poetic development of Europe, 
whose two sovereign lines of evolution we have al- 
ready noted as the Classic and the Northern, or as 
the Mediterranean and the Teutonic. Both these 
world-cultures our poet during the present Epoch 
is absorbing, appropriating, and also reproducing 
in his own multiform compositions. Thus he is 
testing Civilization itself as the supreme vehicle 
for unfolding the individual to his highest worth 
and achievement. 

Specially to the educator this Second Epoch 
would seem to be most interesting and suggestive, 
inasmuch as here can be seen our greatest Anglo- 
Saxon Genius going to his own High-School, and 
following its unique curriculum. Very different is 
it from that earlier Stratford Grammar- School 
with its prescribed course for the boy, which, how- 
ever, is now found everywhere to have been the 
needful preparation for his present world-embrac- 
ing self -education. 



354 SHAKESPEARE'S LIFE-DBAMA 

But enough of this discursive far-branching 
pedagogy, which has served its purpose for Shake- 
speare and for us. Though he be still the Appren- 
tice mounting upward toward his final Mastership, 
a new and distinctive Epoch of his total Appren- 
ticeship has now dawned, which has its own 
separate right of being set forth as it is in itself. 



OBIGINATION 355 



CHAPTER THIRD. 

OBIGINATION 



Here begins a new stage of the poet, whom we 
may now distinctively call the originative Shake- 
speare, in contrast with the precednig Epoch, in 
which he had more or less the tendency to be imi- 
tative, experimental, dependent on somewhat other 
than himself. To be sure, he showed his original 
gift even in his borrowings and gropings after 
alien forms — the seeming borrower r>i the nnbor- 
rowable. Still we are to note henceforth three 
main independences and new self-reliances: 
namely in his art, in his vocation, and in his finan- 
cial estate. That is, he becomes a free man 
poetically, theatrically, and economically. Thus 
we may signal the present as an Epoch of libera- 
tion for the poet, internal and external, in work 
and in life. 

Accordingly it is possible to hear his Genius ad- 
dressing him: "No more experimentation, no more 
imitation, stop writing your Italianized epics, re- 
strict 7/our lyrics to a few stage-songs and tail- 
rhymes, though you may let your love-life pri- 
vately gush out into an occasional sonnet. You are 
hereafter to compose dramas and only dramas, 
since your ultimate Self, your soul's own mould is 
dramatic, and this form of self-expression you have 



356 SHAKESPEABE'S LIFE-DBAMA. 

now won. Cling to it, for it is also the time 's right 
shape and pressure as well as your own. Moreover 
your whole life is to be one great drama in which 
I, your Genius, am to find my completed utterance 
as well as my own highest realisation." 

So it comes that the present Epoch bears the 
stamp of concentration rather than expansion; it 
is a drawing back into itself instead of a continual 
reaching out toward something else and somewhere 
else beyond. The poet has found himself after 
many voyages of exploration, and takes possession 
of his grand discovery as a new field of achieve- 
ment. He has evolved into his basic form of self- 
expression, the drama, which, however, he is still 
further to unfold in itself, to its final and com- 
pleted fulfilment, wherein he will round the total 
compass of his Life-drama. Let us, then, empha- 
size here the fact of his unification, which neverthe- 
less radiates itself into no less than eleven different 
plays. 

In this Epoch, accordingly, we list eight Comedies 
and three Histories, following the classification of 
the First Polio. And the three Histories, as they 
are here designated, belong to Comedy or perhaps 
to Tragi-comedy in their essential character (the 
two Parts of Henry IV and Henry V). Thus we 
behold Shakespeare during the present Epoch 
confining himself not only to the drama, but to one 
kind of drama, namely Comedy. He will write no 
Tragedy during these six years: he indulges and 
develops his purely comic Genius, which thus 



OEIGINATION 357 

reaches it largest and best utterance, culminating 
in the most universally comic personality of the 
Anglo-Saxon world, if not of all Literature, Sir 
John Falstaff. From this point of view, as well as 
from others, we may designate the present exuber- 
ant spell of the poet as his Happy Sexennium— 
happy both as regards himself and his labors, and 
in general depicting happiness after the storm, and 
before it too, as we shall find out later. 

Still it is ours to remember that Shakespeare in 
this his new departure does not by any means throw 
away his former winnings. He keeps and develops 
not a few of the Italian gains of his previous Epoch. 
Especially in his Comedies Italy remains his chief 
storehouse for locality, story, color, and in part for 
character. Thus he is not yet wholly freed of his 
Apprenticeship to tradition and to imitation. 

Here we may hint another turn and far pro- 
founder in the present Epoch : the poet distinctly 
reacts from his previous social revolt, especially in 
his treatment of kingship ; he shows himself more 
in sympathy with the institutions of the past, es- 
pecially with State and Church. Hence his atti- 
tude toward the two Lancastrian Henrys of the 
coming time will reveal in him a deeper and more 
reverent acceptance of royalty than is found in his 
earlier historical plays so fateful to kings. This 
pronounced reconcilement with the institutions of 
his land we should here note well, since we shall 
find it to tower up in sharp contrast not only with 



358 SRAKESPE ABE'S LIFE-DEAMA. 

his evolved lesser past but likewise with his un- 
evolved greater future. 

I. We have, accordingly, reached the signifi- 
cant time in our poet's Life-drama when he has 
risen to the independent mastery of his art and of 
himself, and we may add, of his world, manifesting 
such mastery in his literary works as well as in his 
private transactions. He has attained financial 
success, and thus he has won his economic freedom, 
being no longer bonded to those three slave-drivers 
of our physical body — food, raiment, and shelter. 
Very different was his situation when he first ar- 
rived in London from Stratford; then he hardly 
knew whither to turn for a piece of bread, being 
compelled to the most menial' crfecupations which he 
could pick up about the theatre. Some nine or ten 
years have elapsed since that time ; just behold his 
rise: he is becoming the master not only of this 
little London stage but of the world's stage. In 
fact he, or one of his characters during this Epoch, 
will proudly declare ''All the world is a stage", 
especially Shakespeare's stage. 

And now it is in place for us to try to bring to- 
gether in a single rapid forelook this one consid- 
erable Epoch of the poet's Life-drama, lasting 
about six years, as we measure it, say from 1594-5 
till 1600-1, without exacting too rigid time-limits. 
Let us watch him turning into the present Epoch, 
when he is some thirty years old, and working 
through it till he passes thirty-six in the full tide 
of a fortunate career. He has become a successful 



ORIGINATION 359 

actor, perhaps not great; has advanced to be in 
part owner of a remunerative theatre; but his su- 
preme achievement is that he writes at least eleven 
dramas, about two for each year of this Epoch — 
dramas, most of which still keep their place on the 
stage after more than three centuries. But, what 
is far more significant, all of them are to-day 
perused and pondered, as are no other English 
words, by millions of readers around our entire 
globe. Seemingly the most immortal of European 
writ is this of Shakespeare; so we seize it and 
search it and even belabor it for the secret of its 
immortality, and therein of our own. 

The present Epoch, then, is one of prevailing 
good-fortune to our poet, though not without occa- 
sional clouds flecking its sunshine. Moreover 
through it plays a dominant note of reconcilement 
and restoration both within and without, traceable 
in his soulful speech as well as in his conciliatory 
deeds. In 1596 it is reported that he went back to 
his home in Stratford, and this visit is supposed to 
have been his first one since his departure thence 
in 1585. His three children and his wife were still 
living, probably in Anne Hathaway 's humble cot- 
tage; his father and mother had never given up 
their house in Henley Street, though sinking into 
ever- deepening poverty ; other kindred were in the 
town and neighborhood. Especially, one thinks, 
did he long to see again the mother of his genius, 
Mary Arden Shakespeare, now getting old, but still 
active, as she lives yet a dozen years. Could he 



360 SHAKESPEABB'S LIFE-DBAMA. 

forget her care for his early education, which has 
shown itself the spiritual substructure of his fu- 
ture work and greatness? 

Another incident in this connection is unfor- 
gettable: the death of his only son Hamnet (some- 
times spelled Hamlet), who was buried in the 
Stratford Church August 11th 1596, having 
reached the age of eleven years and a half. The 
sad rite took place doubtless in the presence of the 
father and his family. May we not suppose that 
it was the illness of his boy which brought him 
back to his home, and led the way to his domestic 
reconciliation, as it often does ? At any rate Shake- 
speare never again forgot Stratford to the end of 
his days. In less than a year after his son's fu- 
neral. May 4th 1597, we find him purchasing the 
prominent building known as New Place, .an aris- 
tocratic mansion, a hundred years old and some- 
what decayed like the town itself. There was only 
one larger residence in Stratford, it is said, and 
herein we may catch a glimpse of Shakespeare's 
new purpose in life. , He will employ his wealth to 
win the position of being the first citizen of his 
community, in pursuance of the custom of the time. 
Also he would enjoy the rank and the display of 
the titled Gentleman. Records show that he soon 
starts to repairing his somewhat dilapidated edifice, 
and to laying out a spaciouls garden round it in or- 
der to beautify its weedy neglected grounds, on 
which stood the famous mulberry tree planted by 
the poet himself according to tradition, though long 



OBIGINATION 361 

since whittled into little souvenirs, and eternized 
in many a storied reminiscence. 

Such a deed shows his present spirit, which is 
that of renewal and restoration, starting from that 
renovated mansion, and extending to his own family 
and even to the town itself. For Stratford then 
was in serious decline, approaching complete pov- 
erty. Two large fires in rapid succession had re- 
cently devastated the place (in 1594 and in 1595) 
having destroyed 120 dwelling-houses, so that its 
citizens had to appeal to the country for help. Bad 
harvests followed, the people could not pay their 
national taxes, from which upon petition they were 
released by the Government. Shakespeare gave 
his assistance both at home and at London in get- 
ting relief for his town; indeed he seems to have 
been the most prosperous man in it, if not the only 
one, giving too the best example for its recupera- 
tion. 

Thus we find him in this Epoch doing his part 
toward the uplift of his fallen community. At the 
same time he begins restoring to fresh prosperity 
his declined family, which had shared the fate of 
its environing town. His debt-burdened parent, 
who for years had hardly dared appear in public 
or even at church through fear of some law-officer, 
gets sudden relief from all prosecution, evidently 
by means of the son's timely disbursements. In 
1597 we read of a lawsuit brought Cor the recovery 
of his mother's mortgaged estate known as Asbies, 
doubtless through the instigation of her returned 



362 SHAKESPE ABE'S LIFE-DEAMA 

boy with his pocket full of money, since old John 
Shakespeare, the husband, seems to have sunk 
every penny of hers, as well as of his own, in his 
various stranded speculations. But the most fa- 
mous act in this drama of domestic restoration is 
the poet's attempt to obtain from the College of 
Heralds in London the titled honor of a coat-of- 
arms for his father, who thereby will acquire new 
social rank and prestige, being made over from a 
fugitive plebeian debtor into a fine old aristocratic 
English Gentleman. The mother, who comes of the 
well-born Arden family, is also to partake of the 
new dignity. But doubtless the chief incentive 
must be that William Shakespeare himself, though 
some thirty three years old, would receive through 
this operation a sudden fresh birth, with patrician 
blood throbbing through his veins, and with a titled 
tail-piece tacked to his name. 

Whatever we here and now may think of the 
matter, such ambition for title lay in the worthiest 
of the blood-worshipful time. But the point which 
we should especially select and contemplate in these 
transactions is Shakespeare's spirit, which is seek- 
ing to re-build his shattered town and home, to re- 
store his Family and Community, out of their 
lapsed condition to their happier and better estate. 
Thus he shows himself in his conduct an institu- 
tional man, as well as in his writing, and the great 
dramatist makes just this life of his at Stratford an 
actual drama, quite concordant in its deepest un- 
dertones with his feigned drama at London. Here 



OBIGINATION 363 

it should be added that he must have found still 
in his father's home his younger brother, Edmund 
Shakespeare, sixteen years old in 1596, whom he 
seems to have taken to London with him and to 
have trained for the stage, but who died in 1607 
and was buried at a London church, "with a fore- 
noon knell of the great bell", apparently in honor 
of the deceased, now the son of a Gentleman. Two 
other brothers he doubtless found at Stratford, 
Gilbert (born 1566), Richard (born 1573), on his 
return thither, both younger than himself arid 
Ijrobably needing a little lift from their fortunate 
brother, like the rest of the kin and the town. A 
sister, Joan (born 1569) is to be added to this fam- 
ily group of parents and children, from whom the 
poet was early separated, but whose experiences of 
joy and sorrow lie imbedded, even if veiled and 
transformed, in all his poetry. A little sister, eight 
years old, passed away in 1579, when the poet was 
a youth of fifteen ; echoes of brotherly and motherly 
grief over such a loss (here we may think of Queen 
Constance and her Arthur) may be heard through- 
out his Life-drama. For the domestic strain of 
Shakespeare's work is the fullest, deepest, and 
strongest in it, and could have been derived no 
whence else but from his own home. Thus his 
family appeal with its love in all shapes and turns, 
is intenser and more universal than any other gift 
of his genius. One may be permitted to think that 
his separation from the parental hearth, and his 
undomestic life in London may have caused him to 



364 SEAKESPE ABE'S LIFE-DBAMA 

idealize with so much power the Family during the 
present Epoch, especially in his Comedies, whose 
center is Love's chosen woman, and whose main 
theme is domestic return and restoration after 
outer obstruction removed and the soul 's inner dis- 
sonance overcome. Hence these six years may well 
be deemed the poet's happiest of a life-time, and 
worthy to be named his Happy Sexennium. 

Thus it is here in place to bring to the fore and 
to emphasize the deeply intoned concordance be- 
tween Shakespeare's work and word, the heart- 
singing harmonies uniting his outer and his inner 
worlds, such as will be heard attuning his poetic 
self-expression throughout the forthcoming Epoch. 
Generations of readers and spectators have enjoyed 
and will continue to enjoy with the poet this hap- 
piest time of his life, and they have been enabled 
to make it their own through his magic power of 
impartation. Still here we should give warning 
that this sunlit time of blissful creation with its 
abiding freedom from death, which hardly dares 
enter it, will be followed by just its opposite, 
namely man's darkest eclipse of tragedy ending in 
doomed mortality's passing-away. But with this 
one sudden lurch of pre-sentiment, we shall settle 
back into our immediate outlook on the good time 
prepared for us by Shakespeare 's comic genius. 

II. And now having set down the main personal 
facts and events of this epochal transition of the 
poet, we shall next try for the deeper causes under- 
lying it, as it did not happen altogether by acci- 



OBIGINATION 365 

dent. Nor did it take place in a day nor in a year, 
but it followed its own steady pace of evolution to- 
ward its goal. 

Undoubtedly the time was one of relaxation from 
the tense effort and even anxiety which continued 
to harass England during several years even after 
the defeat of the Armada. For Spain, then the 
mightiest and the wealthiest power in Europe, kept 
threatening to repeat the invasion. But by 1594 
such apprehension had pretty well died down, so 
that the whole land felt more frolicksome and so 
to speak, comic. Then the present Epoch probably 
spanned Queen Elizabeth's best years, when she 
was acknowledged at her greatest, when she was 
more free from outer peril and from internal con- 
spiracy than before or afterwards. Still even now 
she did not wholly escape a domestic treason, 
whereof we shall find the poet himself to show 
some knowledge in his work. 

Still for Shakespeare in person this was the 
gladdest time of all his days— the most harmonious 
in spirit, the most successful in affairs. Not his 
deepest, not his greatest we say, but his happiest, 
as we have the right to infer from his one domi- 
nant note of self-expression, which is that of com- 
edy, or of reconciliation of life's conflicts within 
and without. 

Such a state of mind was quite different from 
what he had ever experienced before. He had been 
more or less the protester, the recalcitrant, the mal- 
content, with a bent toward radicalism perchance. 



366 SRAKESPE ABE'S LIFE-DBAMA. 

discordant with the transmitted social order. His 
near companions had formed that wild set of defiant 
world-storming poets whose chief was Marlowe, 
once his master and exemplar. Young Shakespeare 
without question had shared in their revolt against 
the accepted institutions of their age, had gone 
through the mighty experience of social dissent and 
disharmony, and had sucked that egg dry, being 
now ready to fling away the shell, and to sweep 
forward to the next stage in his life's evolution. 

But let us call up what a fateful spectacle Shake- 
speare had witnessed by 1594-5. That whole crowd 
of rebellious sons of the Muse had before his eyes 
sunk down to death. Through their deeds they had 
shown themselves fated, along with their gigantic 
protagonist Marlowe, whose hapless end in 1593 
we have elsewhere recounted. But they all went 
the same way at last — Greene, Peele, Kyd, Nash — 
a band of poets more tragic in their lives than the 
bloodiest play they ever wrote, and they reveled in 
stage-gore. 

We may dare conceive what must have been Wil- 
liam Shakespeare's most poignant thought as well 
as his tensest resolution when he looked upon that 
real tragedy of his nearest associates enacted on 
life's theatre. He questions his own oracle: 
"Shall I too be fated along with them?" We may 
hear his answer in his work as he turns over a new 
leaf in his book of cardinal resolutions, and starts 
upon the present Epoch which shows a decided re- 
action against what he has been and done hitherto. 



OBIGINATION 367 

We shall find him in this Epoch more and more 
preservative of that social and institutional order 
which has been established of old and handed down 
from the past, and against which he has hitherto 
been in a state of decided tension, if not of open 
conflict. 

Accordingly the question will rise up : how comes 
it that Shakespeare too did not perish with his 
companions when he was in the same boat plunging 
netherwards over the cataract? Can we detect the 
saving element that lay in him specially as distin- 
guished from them? More particularly, what held 
him back from the fate of Marlowe, for years his 
teacher and indeed prototype? Our answer is Con- 
science. We have noticed deeply urgent through 
quite all his works hitherto, even in his earliest 
Henry VI, and most emphatically in his diabolic 
Richard III, the voice of Conscience, that secret 
critic and monitor of the wayward and errant Self 
in the man, that hidden counterstroke within him 
to the negative conduct of his dramatic associates. 
As already set forth, Marlowe is hardly aware of 
Conscience either in his works or in his life, and 
the same must be said generally of his group of 
fellow-poets. But Shakespeare knew it well, felt 
its keenest thrusts, and recorded them in his salient 
characters, as a portion — and, as the matter turned 
out, a saving portion — of his deepest experience. 

We have already remarked and shall have often 
reason to repeat that the poet partook of the most 
searching spiritual movement of his age, namely 



368 SHAKESPE ABE'S LIFE-DBAMA 

Puritanism, from which sprang this new energy of 
Conscience among the English folk. To be sure 
Shakespeare doubtless shunned and laughed at and 
even satirized the vagaries of the Puritans, and he 
also opposed their excesses; still the workings of 
the Puritanic Conscience as well as the language of 
the Puritanic Bible (in the Genevan version) can 
be traced throughout his whole written Life-drama. 

III. Here we cannot help feeling attuned to 
take yet another look at Christopher Marlowe, our 
last look perchance, for he now disappears person- 
ally from Shakespeare's dramatic career and life, 
and from his own. Through all this long Appren- 
ticeship of our poet, we have noticed Marlowe leap- 
ing to the front at its salient conjunctures. Verily 
he seems to be the first promoter and Promethean 
artificer or shaper of Shakespeare's primordial pro- 
toplasmic Genius. Without him and his prelimin- 
inary creative work, we can hardly conceive our 
supreme dramatist to have been what he was, or 
perchance to have become at all. It required a 
Marlowe to develop a Shakespeare— a fact which 
has its striking parallels, and thus by no means 
stands alone in literary history. 

Still the present final influence of Marlowe is al- 
together different from his previous import. For 
he now becomes the source of a strong reaction 
and remonstrance in his former pupil, who faces 
about to the opposite — turns to the conservative 
instead of the radical, to the defender of tradition 
instead of its assailant, to the upholder of the exist- 



ORIGINATION 369 

ing order instead of its adversary. Indeed during 
this Epoch Shakespeare gets to be a direct parti- 
cipant in man's transmitted social system, he be- 
comes a large property-holder, returns to domestic 
and communal life at Stratford, seeks a new social 
title and rank, and so evolves into a completely 
conscious institutional man. Thus he is the anti- 
type of his former prototype Marlowe, in fact of 
his former Self, especially during the earliest Epoch 
of this his Life-drama. 

It will be worth the while to take a brief review 
of the leading phases of the mutual relation between 
Marlowe and Shakespeare, the literary Dioscuri of 
this world-compelling Elizabethan age, verily the 
twin sons of Zeus, born together in the same year 
(1564), not indeed of the same physical mother 
but of the same womb of Time. But the one per- 
ished early (like mythical Castor or real Keats, 
Schiller and many others) with career unfulfilled, 
while the other Olympian brother Pollux (Shake- 
speare, or Goethe) was destined to achieve the full 
cycle of his Life-drama. Still they remain twinned 
in immortality, and continue to revolve about each 
other quite inseparable, the unfulfilled about the 
fulfilled, or the phantom ever circling the reality. 

There is little question that young Shakespeare 
witnessed the early presentation of Marlow's Tam- 
burlane, and therein beheld a gleam of his own fu- 
ture calling. Then followed, in that first Epoch 
already set forth, his collaboration with Marlowe 



370 SHAKESPE ABE'S LIFE-DBAMA 

as master and model, from whom he wins the new 
dramatic verse-rhythm, the mighty line, and the 
magnifieent word as well as the Titanic character- 
isation and spirit of the world-defier. He learns 
to reproduce with increased power the Marlowese 
super-man, whom we may see best as demon Rich- 
ard III. But in the Second Epoch the hitherto in- 
tergrown brain-twins, the two poets, separate from 
each other, become individualized, nidependent yet 
interdependent, each following his own orbit, but 
both still revolving around each other in a common 
attraction and repulsion. This time lasts some 
years, with much significant creation on both sides, 
whereupon the one luminary becomes suddenly ex- 
tinct, and the other speeds aloft along his way 
alone, entering upon the present new Epoch which 
is very different from what has gone before. 

But we are not to think that Marlowe, though no 
longer at hand in living presence, is without influ- 
ence upon Shakespeare. The failure of the Genius 
often leaves a deeper mark upon men and upon 
time than his success; the Moscow defeat of the 
conqueror becomes the greatest event of his life, 
and only a Napoleon could bring upon himself such 
a world-embracing personal eclipse. Marlowe's 
own tragedy left a larger and more lasting impress 
upon Shakespeare than any of his plays. For 
Shakespeare is now determined through Marlowe 
and his fate to strike into a new path which leads 
in the opposite fateless direction. Hence comes 
what we here have called our poet's reaction; he 



OEIGINATION 371 

will evolve himself into what Marlowe was not, and 
will spiritually develop gifts which Marlowe had 
not. He will si^ecially cultivate the Comic Muse 
whose inspiration lay outside of Marlowe's genius; 
he will portray in deei)est love and admiration the 
woman-soul for which Marlowe has little real ap- 
preciation or homage; finally from the mighty non- 
conformist Marlowe reveling in defiant revolt 
against established authority, Shakespeare will turn 
the poetic conformist and upholder of the consti- 
tuted world of Society, Church, and State. We 
shall see him advance from the judgment and the 
dethronement of worthless kings — caitiff John, 
monster Eichard III, elegiac weak Richard II — 
to the enthronement of Henry IV and Henry V as 
heroic royalties. Such is, to our mind, the outer 
transition as well as the inner transformation of 
Shakespeare out of his previous into his present 
Epoch. 

But even during this time and mood of reaction 
and opposition, Shakespeare does not forget the 
great worth of Marlowe, of whom we may still 
catch him breathing many a heartfelt reminder, es- 
pecially in certain Sonnets. Some unique touch 
will force the reader to exclaim : ' ' There ! Shake- 
speare is thinking of his old master. ' ' One Sonnet 
in particular seems to be a glorifying recapitula- 
tion of Marlow's distinctive qualities, as the writer 
looks backward in deep recognition, yet not with- 
out a strain of rivalry (No. 86) : 



372 SHAKESPEABE'S LIFE-DBAMA 

Was it the proud full sail of his great verse, 
Bound for the prize of ail-too precious you, 
That did my ripe thoughts in my brain inhearse, 
Making their tomb the womb wherein they grew? 
Was it his spirit, by spirits taught to write 
Above a mortal pitch, that struck me dead? 
No ! neither he nor his compeers by night 
Giving him aid, my verse astonished. 
He nor that affable familiar ghost 
Which nightly gulls him with intelligence, 
As victors of my silence cannot boast; 
I was not sick of any fear from thence. 
But when your countenance til 'd up his line. 
Then lacked I matter ; that enfeebled mine. 

Certainly Shakespeare could exalt no other contem- 
porary poet but Marlowe for "the proud full sail 
of his great verse", or so strikingly characterize 
"his spirit by spirits taught to write above a mor- 
tal pitch", thus stressing his superhuman Titanic 
fetches of inspiration. Even his group of collabo- 
rators seem darkly suggested, being "his compeers 
by night giving him aid". Some have conjectured 
Chapman to be this rival poet, but he can fulfil no 
such lofty description, even with his famous trans- 
lation of Homer, of being able to ' * inhearse my ripe 
thoughts in my brain". 

So much may reasonably be affirmed; but now 
rise the difficulties of this Sonnet. Who may be the 
"ail-too precious you", proclaimed to be "the 
prize" which the poet is "bound for" in his quest? 



OBIGINATION 373 

Many conjectures : some man or woman, some ideal 
or thing of reality. Thus again we face the ever- 
recurring pronominal problem of the Sonnets gen- 
erally. Three pronouns are here interwoven in its 
fibre: the acknowledged / (Shakespeare, cer- 
tainly), the supposed he (Marlowe probably), the 
mysterious You (cause of multitudinous dubious 
guesses in the commentators). As we look at the 
situation, the poet is here taking a retrospect of his 
early relation to Marlowe, and assigning the reason 
why he was overwhelmed to silence by the latter 's 
co-ercive genius with "his compeers by night giv- 
ing him aid " : 

I was not sick of any fear from thence. 

But when your countenance fil 'd up his line, 

Then lacked I matter ; that enfeebled mine. 

Shakespeare seems to confess that he had no fear 
of the preponderance of Marlowe's genius, except 
that one time "when your countenance fil'd up his 
line", probably an allusion to the first effect of wit- 
nessing Tamhurlane on the young poet, who nat- 
urally then felt his own "lack of matter" and im- 
mature feebleness in comparison with his master's 
"mighty line", as Ben Jonson has famed it. So 
much we can see and say in regard to the purport 
of this Sonnet, without specially hunting down the 
noun for its elusive pronouns you and your. 

In general Marlowe's lot was to be the precursor 
and prophetic harbinger of a greater than himself ; 



374 SHAKESPE ABE'S LIFE-DBAMA. 

just that indeed has given him his larger immortal- 
ity. To-day we cannot read genetically Marlowe's 
plays without feeling that Shakespeare is his true 
fulfilment and realisation. 

IV. This Epoch has, we may again emphasize, 
no tragedies among its eleven dramas, which at 
present constitute the poet's sole activity. He be- 
comes now and remains henceforth purely the dra- 
matist to the end of his career. The rhymed Ital- 
ianized poems of the previous Epoch fall away for- 
ever, and even the little jingling couplets in his 
plays keep getting fewer. His lyricism of love 
finds vent in the ecstasies of his blank-verse, which 
often rises to song's attunement with its own secret 
consonances. Still beneath this overflowing dra- 
matic stream, little melodious pulsations of his 
under-life will bubble up almost in spite of himself, 
throbbing brief emotional jets of his deepest per- 
sonal experience in the form of the Sonnet. 

Hence we shall follow the movement of the pres- 
ent Epoch along the three fore-mentioned lines — 
Comedies, Tragedies, Sonnets, — remembering, how- 
ever, that they are all attuned to one fundamental 
key-note, that of final triumph over obstacles, and 
reconciliation after inner and outer conflict. We 
are never to forget that in life and writ it is the 
poet's Happy Sexennium — not his greatest time 
of productivity, but his happiest. 

Again we would prompt our thinking reader that 
it is worth his while to grapple this Third Epoch 
by itself, and to formulate its distinctive purport 



COMEDIES 375 

separately with its own designation. In like man- 
ner, we have already craved him to scan the mean- 
ing and the connection of the foregoing Second 
Epoch, which shows such strong contrast to the 
one which we now enter upon. But from that out- 
reaching diversification this is now the turn to in- 
ward unification, which is of a special kind: it is 
the poet's reconciled time and the expression of the 
same in the drama, yea in one sort of drama, the 
comic. 



Comedies. 

Specially we are now to treat of that class of the 
poet 's Comedies which are embraced in the present 
Epoch only, inasmuch as they have their own sepa- 
rate character, and reveal their author passing 
through a significant stage of his evolution. He 
wrote other Comedies both before and after the 
present time, but they have in his life a different 
office, if not a different meaning. Already we have 
seen him testing himself in numerous literary 
forms, among which is the comic, and in his last 
Period we shall find him returning to Comedy but 
of a deeper strain, in accord with his new and 
deeper experience. Prom the list of the First Polio 
we set down eight Comedies belonging to the pres- 
ent Epoch, which constitute altogether the largest 
and most diversified part of his work during this 
Happy Sexennium. Thus man and the world now 



376 SHAKESPE ABE'S LIFE-DBAMA. 

turn comic to the poet ; indeed we may say that for 
some six years henceforth Shakespeare's Universe 
becomes one great Comedy. 

Still we are not to forget such a merry and rec- 
onciled spell is but a part, but one scene of his total 
Life-drama, being interjected as it were between 
two tragic periods of creation. The time of Rich- 
ard III and of Romeo and Juliet lies behind him, 
but the immortal pangs of his greatest Tragedies, 
Haynlet and Lear, are yet to come, bringing to the 
reader the profoundest problem of all Shakespear- 
ian psychology. Why should our poet have to turn 
tragic again, more deeply tragic than ever? With 
this single outlooking glimpse, let the question drop 
for the present, since we have next to take a stroll 
through Shakepeare's purely comic domain with 
its varied poetic strains made up of life's dis- 
sonances overcome. 

In general. Comedy starts with some disturbance 
or obstacle, or with some kind of a perverted world, 
which, however, is to be restored from its perver- 
sion, saving itself and its characters in the process 
of the drama. Thus its basic note in Shakespeare 
is mediation, recovery, renewal out of some unto- 
ward experience, which may result from human 
frailty, foible, folly, illusion, or even wrong. Hence 
the comic movement in its wholeness is remedial. 

As regards the eight Comedies embraced in the 
present Epoch, we are hardly able to date them 
separately to the precise year, since no existing 
documents are adequate for such a purpose. Still 



COMEDIES 377 

it is possible to arrange them in three chronological 
groups, which also correspond to their general pur- 
port, as well as to the poet's special development. 

First Group. Somewhere between 1594-5 and 
1596-7, we place three early dramas which have 
enough in common to be clustered into one fascicle. 
They all have a certain setting in illusion or in a 
dream-world. A Midsummer Night's Dr&am may 
be put down as the start, or as the overture, which 
gives the key-note even in its title. Its action moves 
out of real life into fairy-land which is made to 
appear when the characters lie asleep in a wood. 
In such a setting, then, the play turns to a comedy 
of intrigue with its complication and solution. Thus 
the drama is enacted in the world of illusion, is in- 
deed a deceptive vision into which we wander and 
out of which we are restored. The flight to an ideal 
realm, which is so strongly marked in this play, is 
specially to be noticed since it is often repeated by 
Shakespeare under diverse shapes, and must be re- 
garded not merely as one of his artistic devices, but 
as a living experience of his spiritual life. 

Next in order we may consider The Taming of 
the Shrew, whose action is likewise placed in a 
framework of illusion which is supposed to be the 
product of intoxication, not of fairy-land. Before 
the drunken tinker Christopher Sly is played a 
high Shakespearian Comedy of intrigue whose scene 
is set in Italy. Here accordingly are found the 
poet's two main dramatic elements — the elevated 
cultural life of the South and the humble rude life 



378 SHAKESPE ABE'S LIFE-DBAMA. 

of the North — in the form of a play within a play. 
Thus the function of the drama is to make "the 
beggar forget himself" through the illusion of be- 
ing a ' ' mighty lord ' ', and he comes to believe what 
is told him: 

These fifteen years you have been in a dream ; 
Or when you waked, so waked as if you slept — 

dwelling in a kind of double consciousness. 

As to the traveled life of Shakespeare, The Tam- 
ing of the Shrew contains some of the best evidence 
of his having been in Italy. The familiarity here 
shown, with Italian localities, customs, characters, 
even household furniture, could hardly be acquired 
through any other means than personal experience. 
For a little instance, I believe Shakespeare caught 
up that very Italian conversational word hasta 
(enough), from its home-land where it is so 
common. 

The third drama belonging to this early group, 
and the most Italianized of all his works, is the 
well-known Merchant of Venice. While the dream 
is not directly introduced, the setting is now a kind 
of dream-city, which still remains one of the pe- 
culiar charms of Venice upon the stranger. The 
date hovers about 1595-6, according to most ex- 
positors, and suggests the poet 's Italian time, which 
here shows its finest flowering. But that which 
makes the play eternal is its two characters, Portia 
the mediatorial woman, and Shyloek the Jew, who 
is transformed from the Barabas of Marlowe, the 



COMEDIES 379 

prime poetic genius still showing himself an ele- 
mental power in Shakespeare's development. 

Thus the reader is made to feel that The Mer- 
chant of Venice overflows with the poet's own self 
at his happiest. Portia certainly gives the fairest 
picture of his love-life at this time realized in the 
woman, while Shylock brings to the highest and 
purest point his Marlowese gift of expression. 
Then the play in its atmosphere and color seems the 
very bloom of his Italian memories. 

Middle Group. Here we place two Comedies of 
Shakespeare who has now reached his Falstaffian 
mood of creation — Merry Wives of Windsor and 
Twelfth Night. They belong to the time of the Lan- 
castrian Trilogy, Henry IV in its two parts and 
Henry V, which were, written during the years 
1597-9. Thus the Comedies and the Histories of 
the present Epoch interweave at this single point 
in a common character, which is comic, and by such 
agreement bring to light their one underlying prin- 
ciple, which has been already designated as Com- 
edy. Falstaff is really the dominating figure, if not 
the hero of the five mentioned plays. He repre- 
sents the underworld of sense challenging and out- 
doing the overworld of spirit, perverting the same 
to the opposite of itself and so making it comic. 
From the prevailing realm of illusion, or the ideal 
dream-life of the foregoing group, we are now to 
enter the Comedy of sense-life, very real and often 
gross in feature and utterance. 

The first play here to be noted is The Merry 



380 SHAKESPE ABE'S LIFE-DBAMA 

Wives of Windsor, to which Falstaff has been di- 
rectly transferred from Henry IV without a change 
of name. Tradition has handed down that the 
work was written ''in fourteen days", by order of 
Queen Elizabeth, who wished to enjoy Falstaff in 
love, or to see how the old sensualist would conduct 
himself toward married women in a small town. 
The play is based upon Shakespeare's observations 
in three different localities — Windsor, liondon, and 
especially Stratford. All these places are in Eng- 
land, which can have no high-toned Italian group 
speaking in elegant blank-verse. Prosaic English 
common folks furnish the characters as well as the 
social environment. The Southern cultural life is 
quite left out— the only instance in all these Come- 
dies. To be sure Italy may have furnished the 
leading incidents and the main plot, which are said 
to be derived from the Italian Straparola; but the 
names, places, and persons are tricked out in Eng- 
lish home-spun. 

Still the real central experience which gives 
vividness and humor to the play, springs from the 
poet's early life in his native town, Stratford, 
whose taverns and tap-rooms, more than thirty in 
number, could easily duplicate the whole reveling 
crew headed by Falstaff. In that town, too, Shake- 
speare saw and knew the Welsh schoolmaster, and 
doubtless recited lessons under his ferule; Sir 
Hugh could hardly belong to Windsor, but nat- 
urally to the borderland near Wales, where lies 
Stratford. Hence it comes that on certain lines 



COMEDIES 381 

this Merry Wives may be deemed the most bio- 
graphic externally, though not internally, of all 
the poet's Comedies. 

The second play of the present group illustrating 
the Comedy of sense-life, or of physical appetites 
is Twelfth Night, whose most characteristic feature 
is the noisy set of Falstaffian revelers, quite like 
those of Eastcheap and of Windsor, though Sir 
John here becomes Sir Toby. Moreover the scene 
is not set now in a town tavern or a city bar-room, 
but in the private household of a high lady, the 
wealthy niece of Sir Toby, named Olivia, round 
whom as center spins the action. There is the 
upper line of personages, Italian or Italianized; 
but the dramatic stress is placed upon the native 
English crowd of wild merry-makers, whose doings 
take up quite two-thirds of the play, 

Though the poet may have intended to make Sir 
Toby the leading character, the steward Malvolio 
has really usurped the first place, so that the play 
is sometimes titled Malvolio, as if he were its hero. 
And probably he is the most original personage of 
the lot, revealing a special relation to the time. For 
the poet here takes a side-glance at Puritanism, the 
great spiritual movement of the age, in which we 
hold emphatically that he shared, must have shared, 
in order to be the time's supreme poet. Undoubt- 
edly he could laugh at the eccentricities of Puri- 
tanism while believing in its true values, as for 
example, its revived conscience. Thus, to take a 
modern instance, Emerson ridiculed and even pub- 



382 SHAEESPE ABE'S LIFE-DBAMA 

licly spoke against Emersonianism in its excess, for 
the support of his own right doctrine. As this play 
and this character are often cited to prove Shake- 
speare's personal hostility to the Puritanic spirit, 
we may briefly look at the supposedly antagonistic 
passages. 

It is Maria, Malvolio's bitter foe in the house- 
hold, who first says of him, ' ' sometimes he is a kind 
of Puritan", not because of his religion, which does 
not directly appear anywhere, but because of the 
strict fulfilment of his office in restraining the 
drunken riot, waste, and uproar of the revelers, 
which she, for her own ends, would tolerate. Such 
was certainly the duty of Malvolio as steward of 
Olivia's household. But this same Maria takes 
back her own words a little later when she says: 
"the devil a Puritan that he is, or anything con- 
stantly but a time-pleaser", an expression which 
not only denies Malvolio's Puritanism, but on the 
contrary opposes him to it as regards character. 
These two contradictory passages, though often 
quoted to show Shakespeare 's hate of the Puritans, 
may well suggest rather the reverse. For the stew- 
ard in moral worth is the best person of the lot. 
To be sure Shakespeare's good-humored protest in 
favor of moderate enjoyment against Puritanic- 
austerity may be heard in the well known dictum: 
"Dost thou think, because thou art virtuous, that 
there shall be no more cakes and ale?" 

Not the most winning character in the play but 
the most conscientious, the most dutiful is this 



COMEDIES 383 

Malvolio, and liis mistress Olivia recognizes his 
value. But just that recognition of his moral merit 
calls forth his vs^eakness, his folly, his comic foible ; 
Olivia's gratitude for righteous service he mistakes 
for love, and thus becomes a subject for comic retri- 
bution through the unrighteous revelers. But this 
so-called Puritanism is not the ground of his pen- 
alty; nor has he been guilty of wrong or sin, but 
of a ridiculous absurdity sprung of his ' ' self-love ' ', 
which possessed him in spite of or just through his 
overstrained moralism. 

Third Group. We now come to the third and 
last group of Shakespeare's Comedies, composed 
during his Happy Sexennium. The transition is 
somewhat striking, whereof the main point is this: 
Falstaff and his jolly sensual band of roisterers 
vanish, and their place is taken by quite a different 
set of fun-makers. The tavern and its inmates 
which have been insistently present in five plays 
(two Comedies and three Histories), are henceforth 
to pass off the scene, and other social centers of the 
comic characters appear. So we may say that the 
Falstaffian world has spent ieself, having played 
its part in the poet's Life-drama. 

The present Group, as we construe it, contains 
three Comedies which we set down in their order: 
As You Like It, Much Ado About Nothing, All's 
Well That Ends Well. The composition of these 
plays hovers about 1599-1601, that is, after the 
Falstaffian Group. 

Noticeable is the fact that in these three plays 



384 SHAKESPEABE'S LIFE-DBAMA. 

the comic spirit begins to abate; a serious, even a 
dark and melancholy strain begins to get more 
prominent and distinctive, though they remain 
Comedies. Indeed Tragedy starts to peep out of 
the poetic treatment, undoubtedly reflecting the 
present mood of the author, and hinting whither 
he is moving. Especially is such a change observ- 
able in the lower native or English line of char 
acters, in which Shakespeare shows himself most 
distinctly and naturally at home. 

Still the more aristocratic Italian line of person- 
ages representing the Italianized strain of the poet, 
and indicated by the poetical form as well as by the 
theatrical setting, is kept up in all three plays, and 
voices the elevated, genteel, cultural element of the 
social order. 

As the first member of this Group we take As 
You Like It, whose general sweep embraces a flight 
from social wrong to the primitive idyllic life of the 
Forest of Arden. Here is the grand curative prin- 
ciple which heals the world of wrong, and then re- 
stores the fugitives. Very profound and suggestive 
runs the undercurrent of this favorite Comedy, 
which implies that human society may become per- 
verted in itself, and destructive of its purpose, 
whereupon is to be applied the remedy. Thus the 
Forest of Arden is remedial, restorative, a kind of 
spiritual sanatorium both for the individual and 
the institution. 

Still there is one individual who refuses to be 
cured, who seemingly cannot be restored out of his 



COMEDIES 385 

negation and pessimism. This is the melancholy 
Jaques, who is portrayed with such decision and 
directness that the reader can hardly help identify- 
ing him with Shakespeare himself in one of his 
overcast or cynical moods. Moreover Jaques in a 
number of points is the precursor and prophecy of 
the coming tragic Hamlet, the melancholy Dane, 
who is endowed more deeply and variously with the 
same world-gloom. 

Next after the foregoing play we would put 
Much Ado About Nothing, since treatment and con- 
ception are growing darker, though the entire ac- 
tion still conforms to a comedy. The villain now 
appears and victimizes the innocent young lady, 
Hero, by blasting her good-name and her hope of 
marriage, till she be rescued by a humorous variety 
of instrumentalities. Here again is shown the 
world of wrong, though there is no flight to an idyl- 
lic life for restoration. The Falstaffian band of 
revelers, once so prominent, has dwindled down to 
the stupid officials, who through sheer imbecility 
render an important service. On the other hand 
Benedict and Beatrice, belonging to the high-toned 
set, spend their bright sallies upon each other till 
their unmarriageable wit undoes itself and becomes 
comic, ending in the mutual self-surrender of love 
and marriage. Thus we see in this play not merely 
the wit of comedy but the comedy of wit, its ab- 
surdity and final self-negation into its opposite. 
Verily the poet's comic world is showing signs of 
evanishment, and his Happy Sexennium is not so 



386 SEAKESPE ABE'S LIFE-DBAMA. 

happy as it once was, telling such a forecast of the 
coming close. 

Still one more play, All's Well That Ends Well, 
is to be assigned to this third Group of Comedies 
though it is far more serious than comic, present- 
ing as it does, a wrenching social problem with a 
very problematical solution. It winds up, however, 
in triumph and reconciliation for the daring 
woman, the wont-bursting Helena, the grand defier 
of her sex's ultimate tradition. On the whole hers 
rises up the strongest feminine will found in all 
Shakespeare, more massive even than that of Lady 
Macbeth, whose mind breaks down under her deed. 
Helena is the culmination or rather the farthest 
extreme of a line of mighty-hearted female charac- 
ters whose lofty summits overtop all these Comedies 
— Portia, Rosalind, Helena — who grapple with and 
surmount fate's sorest opposition, in order to get 
the man they love. So this Helena may be deemed 
the female Titan of Shakespeare, whom he hoists 
up as a colossal figure on the apex of the completed 
temple of his Comedies. The deepest contradiction 
of her sex she challenges and overcomes in her way ; 
her very womanhood she stakes in order to win 
womanhood's prize — love. And all this is done by 
her not through sudden impulse but with the 
subtlest far-reaching reflection. On the whole she 
may be acclaimed Shakespeare's greatest darer, 
masculine or feminine. 

So it comes that she cannot be called a pleasant 
character — she is too womanly gigantic, too hu- 



COMEDIES 387 

manly threatening for us poor mortals. And such 
a play Shakespeare, the expert playwright, must 
have known would be disagreeable to his audience, 
quite unpresentable — and still he composed it, not 
for money or fame — for what then ? His genius had 
to write itself out to its fulfilment. Shakespeare 
made this drama for his own self-expression, for 
his fulfilled Life-drama, and it is not the only one 
of that kind in his works. Eounding his evolution 
he had run up against the grand antinomy between 
means and end cleaving human conduct : which 
fact is suggested by the title of the play, which 
makes all well if it but end well. Can sin ever be 
the right instrument to produce virtue? For here 
is a case "where both (man and woman) sin not 
and yet a sinful fact ' '. The problem of conscience 
which so often crops out along the entire course of 
Shakespeare's Life-drama now turns up in this 
shape : Can conscience be violated in order to ful- 
fil the behest of conscience ! Eosalind also speaks 
of "points in the which women give the lie to their 
consciences". The function of Helena is to me- 
diate her soul's deepest, contradiction, and justify 
the daring proverb All's Well That Ends Well. 
Did it ever rise in Shakespeare 's own experience to 
witness the feat and the character of this unparal- 
leled Helena, mightier in will, more demi-godlike 
than her far-famed namesake of Troy? 

Here then we close the series of eight Comgdies 
in whose three Groups we observe a distinct develop- 
ment of the poet. On the whole they put the woman 



388 SHAKESPE ABE'S LIFE-DBAMA 

at the center of their world, of which the mistakes 
and ills and conflicts she is to reconcile through her 
ultimate nature, her love. The man in these Come- 
dies plays a secondary role, even the man whom 
she chooses. Herein the poet drew from his own 
early experience during his Stratford days; we 
have already emphasized the superiority of his 
mother to his father in his home-life. Indeed one 
questions why Shakespeare did not name these 
Comedies after the leading female characters, for 
instance giving to The Merchant of Venice the title 
of Portia. Was it some prejudice in the man or in 
the time? But we are never to forget that on 
Shakespeare's stage women's parts were taken by 
male actors or by ' ' squeaking boys " ; so it seems 
the titles also had to be disguised. Still even the 
listless listener would be likely to detect the dis- 
cord of a male voice intoning the female love-rap- 
tures of Cleopatra. 

Here then the poet brings to a close his dis- 
tintively Comic Epoch, having expressed himself in 
eight Comedies, which belong to his Apprenticeship, 
showing still his partial imitation and appropria- 
tion of Italian sources blent with his strong native 
originality. He might have gone on writing pleas- 
antly and easily such Comedies for the rest of his 
life, if an altogether new mood, or rather some 
mighty spiritual compulsion had not come over him, 
involving a totally different, in fact the opposite 
form of self-expression. "We are soon to see Shake- 
speare tower gigantically to be the world 's supreme 



HISTOBIES 389 

tragic poet, of which change we are yet to probe to 

the wellhead. 

The foregoing account of these eight Comedies 
seeks not to give any complete explication of their 
structure, style, and multitudinous characters. 
They are considered briefly and simply from one 
point of view: their place in the evolution of 
Shakespeare's total personality. The inquisitive 
reader will naturally consult somewhat of the vast 
Shakespearian literature which has busied itself 
with these plays, but which lays its chief stress 
upon the work of the man rather than upon the 
man's own selfhood in his work. (I may be per- 
mitted here to whisper parenthetically to my fel- 
low-student, that if he wishes to see my much 
fuller exposition of these eight Comedies — with 
emphasis upon their objective side rather than their 
personal — he will find it in my book titled The 
Shakespearian Drama — Comedies) . 

11. 

Histories. 

We are now to grapple with the three English 
Historical plays, which belong to the present 
Epoch; and which constitute one closely interre- 
lated work whose emphatic unity calls up the desig- 
nation of it as a Trilogy, or one drama in three 
Parts. These are the First and Second Henry IV, 
and Henry V. Moreover the whole Trilogy was 
written in the couple of years lying between 1597 



390 SHAKESPE ABE'S LIFE-DBAMd 

and 1599, at one stretch of time, and under one 
pnsh of conception and inspiration. The style, the 
basic thought, and largely the characters remain 
the same from start to finish, though the excellence 
is by no means equal ; indeed there is a kind of de- 
scent in merit from the first play till the last. 

In like manner the present Trilogy bears the 
stamp of this Epoch on account of the stress which 
it puts upon the spirit's recovery and reconcilia- 
tion, after a time of conflict and scission. Undoubt- 
edly it reveals socially destructive agencies ai work, 
but it shows them overcome at the close, and thus 
it is essentially a Comedy, both in each of its three 
several Parts and in its totality. Here we are to 
see that this Trilogy of English Histories is at its 
deepest intergrown and unified with the foregoing 
line of eight Comedies. In each kind, in the His- 
tories as well as in the Comedies, the outcome is a 
reconciled lot both of the individual and the insti- 
tution, even if a dark tragic streak now and then 
rises to the surface and interweaves itself till it be 
somehow mediated in the final harmony. Such was 
Shakespeare's characteristic mood during this 
Epoch of six or seven years ; hence we have chris- 
tened it his Happy Sexennium. 

A word about the use of words in this connection. 
The mindful reader will recall that we have al- 
ready had an historical Trilogy, indeed a Lancas- 
trian Trilogy in its three Parts, named after Henry 
VI, son of Henry V. But that was a very dif- 
ferent production in style, thought, and maturity 



EISTOBIES 391 

from the present one; especially the mental stage 
of the poet creating it was on a number of points 
quite the opposite. Then Shakespeare wrought 
madly fermenting in his Collaborative Epoch, be- 
ing also lashed to emulation by the Titanic genius 
of Marlowe. That was some ten years past, during 
which time our poet has undergone much experi- 
ence, and received from it a mighty development 
which has been already outlined. 

Still it is well to stop long enough to emphasize 
by way of contrast that Shakespeare 's first Trilogy 
of English Histories, Henry VI, mirrors him as 
reveling in bloody, death-dealing Tragedy, not in 
happily ended Comedy — as being the embryonic 
Shakespeare in wild fermentation, not yet evolved 
into his reconciled mood of dramatic creation, 
which is the characteristic strain of the present 
Epoch, and which culminates in this second Lan- 
castrian Trilogy of English Histories. And we may 
add the reflection that the earlier Trilogy his- 
torically is the later biographically, so that he wrote 
these two groups of plays backwards in time though 
forwards in life, according to his own spirit's ex- 
perience, for whose sake he dared reverse the forth- 
right march of History. Hence Shakespeare's 
youthful fate chose to depict the fate of the son 
Henry VI long before he did that of the father 
Henry V, molding the brittle body of old Time 
into a new shape congruent with his own inner 
evolution. 

Undoubtedly this Trilogy connects back both in 



392 SHAKESPE ABE'S LIFE-DBAMA 

History and in Shakespeare with the play of Rich- 
ard II, which starts its leading motives as well as 
prophesies its coming and its conclusion. Hence 
most interpreters not without reason make Richard 
II the overture to the foregoing Trilogy and call 
the related four dramas the Lancastrian Tetralogy. 
At present, however, our purpose is to stress the 
epochal difference between these two compositions 
in spite of their close historic connection, and to 
probe to the meaning of this difference for the life 
of the poet. Richard II is decidedly Italianized in 
style and soul, discoursing sweet sentiment even 
to the point of sentimentality, while the Trilogy is 
stoutly and wholly English in spirit and expression. 
Richard II has no comic vein, and no prose, while 
the Trilogy, has an overplus of both, culminating in 
Falstaff. Then what a difference between them in 
the might and the certainty of characterisation and 
of language ! 

But the deepest, widest, most essential diversity 
which separates the two works springs out of the 
supreme change in the attitude of the poet toward 
his environing institutional world, especially State 
and Church. Hitherto he has been a protester 
against if not a defier of the existent social order, 
but now he turns about and becomes a conformist 
and a conservative, which is his part in the present 
Trilogy. Not so sudden has been the transforma- 
tion, since he has had three years and more for 
meditating and fulfilling his spirit's grand meta- 
morphosis. From his anti-institutional trend along 



EISTOBIES 393 

with Marlowe and his wild lawless set of fellow- 
poets, he has been strangely transmuted into an in- 
stitutional man and poet. Thus ' Shakespeare has 
bridged the chasm across from his previous youth- 
ful time of spiritual opposition to the prescribed 
order of society, and has entered upon his new 
forthcoming Epoch which accepts and upholds the 
transmitted establishment both political and re- 
ligious, as this is poetically set forth in the career 
of the two Henrys of the present Trilogy. 

It is no wonder, then, that Queen Elizabeth re- 
garded Shakepeare's Richard II, which stages 
vividly the dethronement and demise of a monarch, 
as a revolutionary play, and forbade its presenta- 
tion before the people at a time of threatened pop- 
ular insurrection, in which by the way some of the 
poet's patrons and high-born friends were involved. 
But why select Richard II for royal disapproval 
when all of Shakespeare's previous English-His- 
torical plays, five in number and covering quite two 
Epochs of his total Life-drama, show the sovereigns 
of England called to account, unkinged, and even 
deprived of life by violence? Such had been the 
nature of his dramatic contribution in the historic 
field up to the present. Altogether he has hitherto 
depicted four English Kings dragged down from 
royalty and slain : such was his selection of themes, 
which gives an indication of his spirit. But mark 
now his change : the two monarchs of this Trilogy, 
the two Henrys, triumph over conspiracy and re- 
bellion; pacify the land, and conquer the foreign 



394 SHAKESPE ABE'S LIFE-DBAMA 

foe. And they die in their beds at peace externally, 
if not internally. 

Here we may also take note of the transforma- 
tion in Shakespeare's poetical associates. The old 
set of dramatists headed by Marlowe have passed 
off the stage of life in their own life's tragedy, 
which has been witnessed and taken to heart by 
Shakespeare, who is now about the sole survivor 
of that daring denying group, once so defiant of 
custom, law, and institution. The lesson of their 
fate he has learned, and he proposes to utter his 
vast new experience in his own native form, which 
we may see in the present dramatic Trilogy. For 
the poet's intensest drive is toward self-expression, 
giving voice to what he has struggled through in 
the deepest depths of life. Hence we may say that 
his time of Storm and Stress is now transcended, 
having evolved him into his reconciled Epoch, his 
Happy Sexennium. 

But behold, another poetical environment gath- 
ers about him, very different from that early band 
like Kyd, Peele, Greene, and the rest. Shakespeare 
is now the center, the acknowledged head of the 
drama, no longer the imitator but the imitated. 
This new set of fellow-dramatists, of whom he is 
the supreme luminarj^ and who shine largely to- 
day through his light, may be headed by Ben Jon- 
son as first, then followed by Marston, Chapman, 
Middleton, and others. They constitute the truly 
Shakespearian group with its peculiar development 
and character, stamping the Elizabethan age with 



EIST0BIE8 395 

the sovereign seal of the world's literature. Some 
recent Shakespearian criticism has dug up a speck 
of news concerning the petty jealousies and feuds 
among this later group of poets, in whose tiny ani- 
mosities the great Shakespeare is supposed to have 
become embroiled. Very dubious is the whole argu- 
ment, and even if proved, it would hardly be worth 
its ink. No doubt Shakespeare alludes to a very 
able rival singer in his sonnets; but the poet who 
alone might be worthy of such a transcendent rec- 
ognition has been already indicated — Marlowe. 

Another cardinal distinction is here to be pon- 
dered: in the Histories it is the man who stands 
emphatically in the foreground and is celebrated 
as the hero; while in the Comedies the woman is 
put to the top, and pedestaled over tlie man as the 
heroine. Thus it would seem that these two kinds 
of dramas are sexed in their way; Comedy here is 
feminine at its best, while History is dominantly 
masculine. What does this mean? Shakespeare 
probably regarded the woman as queen of domestic 
life, which is the main sphere of his Comedies ; but 
to the man chietly he assigned political life, which 
is the leading theme of his Histories. Still else- 
where and at other times Shakespeare has limned 
us in strong outlines, the political woman as Queen 
Margaret in Henry VI, and Lady Macbeth, and per- 
chance pathetic Constance. But in his present 
mood, that of the Happy Sexennium, he in general 
makes the woman the deeply reconciling character 
of the discords and conflicts of the Family; while 



396 SHAKESPE ABE'S LIFE-DRAMA 

the man is to meet and to overcome inner scission 
and open rebellion in the State. Thus the two 
separate sexes he enthrones in the two separate in- 
stitutions, Family and State, assigning to them 
respectively his two art-forms, Comedy and His- 
tory. 

At first it causes some wonderment that Shake- 
speare, lover of the woman-soul, especially during 
his Happy Sexennium, should reduce to such rela- 
tive insignificance the lofty ladies of this Trilogy. 
There is hardly a pronounced character among 
them, though we catch pretty passing glimpses of 
several grand dames, most remember able of whom 
perhaps is Hotspur's wife w^ith her fondling threat : 
"I'll break thy little finger, Harry". Strangely 
the realest woman in love does not now speak 
English at all, being the daughter of the Welsh 
chieftain, Owen Glendower, who seemingly has not 
allowed her to learn that hated Saxon speech which 
he, however, both knows and sings as a poet. So 
she has to gabble even on the stage a foreign dialect 
to her English husband, Mortimer, who cannot un- 
derstand her, dolefully sighing: ''My wife can 
speak no English, I no Welsh". Again we cannot 
help thinking that here is another transcript of 
Shakespeare's own youthful experience in his bor- 
der home-town, the somewhat bilingual Stratford. 
Then the next most prized woman, Katharine, 
speaks a hobbling English-French or a yet lamer 
French-English. 

Queen Elizabeth, that haughty, self -asserting, 



FIRST PART OF HENBY lY. 397 

all-exaeting woman, could find little compliment for 
herself and her dignity in the poet's treatment of 
these high courtly dames of the present Trilogy. 
This fact may also mirror the present mood of 
Shakespeare toward Elizabeth, between whom and 
some of the poet's noble friends, especially 
Southampton, had started during these years a 
rupture which ended a little later in downright re- 
volt — whereof something more in the future. 
Meanwhile Dame Quickly, queen of the Eastcheap 
pothouse, holds her reveling court in all its under- 
worldly splendor throughout the entire Trilogy, 
being its sovereign woman. 

The First Part of Henry IV. The best and most 
popular play of this Trilogy, and with good reason : 
it depicts the clearest-cut and largest characters, it 
is written in the poet's happiest style, it has more 
unity of action and thought than either of the other 
Parts. Indeed it would doubtless rank with the 
greatest six or seven among the author's entire 
works. But the point which we would at present 
stress about it, is that it contains in its happenings 
more numerous and significant glimpses of the per- 
sonal Shakespeare than any other single one of his 
dramas. Hence we may well deem it his most auto- 
biographic play, revealing much about himself 
when the dramatic disguise is peeped under. From 
this viewpoint we shall take several glances at or 
rather beneath its somewhat veiled events. 

(1) The supreme political or historic fact of 



398 SHAKESPEARE'S LIFE-DBAMA. 

this drama is England's desperate struggle with 
rebellion. Everywhere we hear the notes of prepa- 
ration of civil authority against its threatened over- 
throw. The nation is summoned to defend itself 
against its own dissolution. The rebellious spirit 
of the time taints the one supreme family of the 
North, the Percys, which spirit must be eradicated 
before any public peace is possible. The prota- 
gonists of these two contending energies are Prince 
Henry and Hotspur, of whom the latter perishes 
and with himself his cause. Thus the poet in his 
dramatic way affirms the wrong of revolution and 
its undoing along with that of its valiant but mis- 
guided supporters. 

Now the emphatic matter at this point is that 
Shakespeare in his previous Lancastrian play, 
Bichard II, has shown quite the opposite trend, 
namely toward upholding the right of revolution. 
There the king is dethroned and slain, and a tri- 
umphant rebel becomes monarch. Undoubtedly 
this is the course of history; but why did the poet 
successively choose such diverse themes'? They in- 
dicate the great change in his spirit's development, 
which took place in the three years or so which lie 
between these two compositions, as has been already 
set forth. Shakespeare himself in his life's deep- 
est experience has turned from being a rebel into 
the stout maintainer of what is established. Thus 
we stress the pivotal transition from revolt to ac- 
ceptance, from the right to the wrong of revolution 
in the Apprenticeship of the poet, from the poetic 



FIRST PART OF HEKKY FF. 399 

censor of the transmitted order to its dramatic 
upholder. 

Here we are likewise to mark that in Elizabeth's 
reign during these very years, rebellion was brew- 
ing in the hearts of several noblemen of the Queen's 
court — Essex, Southampton, and others, with whom 
Shakespeare stood in ties of some intimacy. This 
whole play may be taken as a warning of the dan- 
gers of insurrection blazoned by the poet to his hot- 
headed blue-blooded friends. In fact Hotspur is 
pictured largely though not wholly from Southamp- 
ton, who was also the soldier, the high-spirited 
cavalier now in revolt against the Queen's author- 
ity, for which he will later be condemned to death 
though not executed, as was Essex. The vivid im- 
pression produced by Hotspur springs from the 
poet's immediate vision and experience; he knew 
the actual man, and may have served under him a 
while as a soldier. To be sure, Southampton pa- 
tronized poetry while Hotspur pretends to hate it, 
though poetical in his very hate. 

Thus an atmosphere of insurrection hovers over 
this drama from beginning to end, and doubtless 
reflects the feeling of the poet 's environment at the 
time. But the untoward revolt is suppressed vig- 
orously and bloodily both in the play and in the 
fact. King Henry's ideal triumph on the stage 
foreshows the real one of Queen Elizabeth, for 
Shakespeare's far-gleaming signal of warning was 
not heeded by those before whose eyes it was 
flashed. And the poet himself after this Happy 



400 SHAKESPEAEE'S LIFE-DBAMA 

Sexennium will be plunged into an ever-deepening 
gloom over the tragic fate of his high-placed friends 
and noble patrons. But that chapter of his life is 
to come in its order. 

(2) Such is what we may call the Established 
World asserting itself victorious over the inner re- 
volt and disruption of its upper class. But in the 
drama rises a social appearance quite of the other 
and lower layer, namely the Perverted World 
which centers in the tavern of Eastcheap, and 
whose right king is Sir John Falstaff. It is de- 
voted to all sorts of sensuous indulgence, which 
perverts both the individual and society from the 
rational purpose of human existence. It is essen- 
tially comic, self-annulling, absurd, and hence in 
the last outcome, tragic, as we shall note in the 
fate of Falstaff. And we may well prefigure that 
this Happy Sexennium is destined, in the poet's 
dramatic evolution, to turn into Tragedy, when it 
has spent itself creating and performing its eleven 
Comedies inclusive of its Histories. But wait a 
while! upon our poet that stroke of the time has 
not yet fallen. 

The connecting link between these two Worlds, 
the perverted and the ordered, or between Falstaff 's 
Eastcheap and the King's Palace is Prince Henry, 
son and heir of the Monarch. Thus the royal youth 
takes over into himself and conjoins in his own ex- 
perience the extremes of the social system, the up- 
permost and the lowest, the positive and the nega- 



FIEST PART OF HENRY IF. 401 

tive phases of man's associated life. Consequently 
Prince Henry is the one character spanning the 
total arch of the play's action; he belongs to both 
its leading threads, the serious and the comic, the 
actual historic and the fictional humorous, the court 
and the tavern. 

Now it is this fact which specially makes him in 
the present drama the true image and the repre- 
sentative of Shakespeare himself, who has recently 
passed through essentially the same experience in 
life. For our poet also had taken his purgatorial 
journey through a literary Eastcheap with his 
rabblement of reveling poets, as already set forth ; 
and, he, having risen out of it, is now looking back- 
ward, proposing to tell about it after his dramatic 
way. The chief vehicle of his experience and finally 
of his soul's transformation is just this Prince 
Henry, though the outward circumstances of the 
men be directly opposite. But just through this 
contrast is the spiritual unity of the two peni- 
tents emphasized the more intimately. The i)oet 
is here telling his change of heart and his confes- 
sion by means of literature, which thus becomes his 
ultimate absolution and reconciliation, inner and 
outer. Prince Henry's palingenesis, which runs 
through and interconnects the whole Trilogy, is in 
essence Shakespeare's. 

It may be said that the poet has in several pass- 
ages made his identity with the Prince quite too 
overwhelming for the good of his drama. Espe- 
cially m the well-known soliloquy (Act I. Scene 2.) 



402 SHAKESPE ABE'S LIFE-DBAMA. 

when the Prince says that ''this loose behavior" of 
his present life is merely put on for a while with 
design, and that he will throw it off at the right 
moment, and ' ' pay the debt I never promised ' ', we 
hear the old experienced Shakespeare looking back 
consciously to the past, and not the young inexperi- 
enced Prince driving forth unconsciously to the fu- 
ture. Hence the character has been pronounced 
at this point discordant, unnatural, even priggish. 
But our interest is to watch even the expert dra- 
matist Shakespeare fall out of his role in his zeal 
for self-expression, since he is the one who has gone 
through the mill already, and, knowing all about it, 
can proclaim his good new resolutions in view of 
foregone bitter trials. But that is not the case with 
boyish Prince Hal, who has just started to quaff 
his first draughts of Falstaff's intoxicating word- 
wine, and to revel in the magic of that all-dissolv- 
ing comic personality. 

Still the whole career of Henry IV, from the 
riotous defiant Princeling to the heroic political 
and religious Monarch, is unfolded with such sym- 
pathy of soul and speech that we catch the very 
thought and tone of the poet here shriving him- 
self after his new-won outlook on life. The entire 
Trilogy, through which the evolution of Henry V 
streams from youth to ripest manhood's fulfilment 
in the deed, becomes a kind of panoramic pageant 
of Shakespeare's own stages of development, from 
his early London days up to the time of this poem's 
composition — to be sure, with a shocking difference 



FIBST PAST OF EENEY IV. 403 

of social conditions, not unlike that between King 
Cophetua and his beggar maid. 

(3) Turning from these deeper currents of the 
poet 's revelation of his own spirit 's progress in this 
drama, we may next glance at some of its more ex- 
ternal events which hint of his youthful days at 
Stratford and their experiences. For instance, the 
Welsh borderland with its people and their con- 
flicts often lies in the background of the present 
play, whereof we have already given a telling 
sample in the furious duel between English Morti- 
mer and Welsh Glendower "on gentle Severn's 
sedgy bank", which was not far from Shakespeare's 
birth-town. Indeed the extraordinary vividness of 
these scenes, as well as certain added strokes, show 
that the poet took them direct from tradition and 
from actual life on the border more than from the 
dry old annalist Holinshed, who tallies down his 
desiccated events and persons one after the other 
in due mummied succession. And our good reader 
has not forgotten (we dare hope) that on a former 
page we have indicated how the high cavalier Hot- 
spur seems to have had some very humble experi- 
ences of cottage-life, quite similar to those of the 
young husband Shakespeare in Anne Hathaway 's 
rural cabin redolent of cheese and garlic. 

Many other little touches of the poet's Stratford 
time we may trace in this drama, if we take the 
trouble to look beneath his dramatic disguise into 
his own heart, which bubbles out of these youthful 
experiences with intoxicating freshness. It seems 



404 SHAKESPEABE'S LIFE-DBAMA 

to me that I hear the laddie poet Willie Shake- 
speare spouting or rather singing those love-ecsta- 
cies under the mask of Mortimer, when the latter 
addresses his Welsh lady-love : 

I understand thy looks : that pretty Welsh 
Which thou pour'st down from these swelling 

heavens 
I am too perfect in ... . 
I understand thy kisses and thou mine — 

which language (of osculation) was the only one 
they could converse in with reciprocal intelligence 
and satisfaction, each being ignorant of the other's 
articulate speech. But listen to that lover-oath of 
raptured Mortimer-Shakespeare with its tingling 
cadence : 

But I will never be a truant, love, 
Till I have learned thy language ; for thy tongue 
Makes Welsh as sweet as ditties highly penned, 
Sung by a fair queen in a summer's bower. 
With ravishing division, to her lute. 

Such is the scene : the young Stratford poet hold- 
ing a kind of eisteddfod or tournament of song 
with his Welsh sweetheart in the two mutually 
unintelligible languages somewhere out on the bor- 
derland of England and Wales. 

Did Shakespeare himself feel somewhat of that 
strange supernatural terror which seemed to be 
homed in the mountains of Wales, and which ap- 
peared incarnate in the wonder-working Glendower 



SECOJTD FAET OF HEN BY IV. 405 

whose supposed unearthly prowess made the Eng- 
lish shiver with dread? King Henry lets peep his 
own secret awe, titling the Welsh chieftain "that 
great magician, damned Glendower", and proclaims 
that English Mortimer 

durst as well have met the devil alone 
As Owen Glendower for an enemy. 

And Falstaff likewise calls the uncanny Welsh foe 
"that devil Glendower", and, evidently trembling 
in lips, whispers to the Prince: "Art thou not 
horribly afraid ? doth not thy blood thrill ? ' ' Even 
Hotspur who makes so much fun of Glendower 's 
supernatural pretensions to his face, shows a good 
deal of respect for him behind his back. Thus 
quite a little strain of Welsh and English super- 
stition, or perchance folk-spirit is woven through 
this drama, all of which the boy must have imbibed 
at first hand from his Stratford entourage. 

Still a striking omission should again be re- 
marked in this connection. A wonderful poetic 
world over in Wales across the border had many 
centuries before been built at Caerleon on the Usk, 
which was famed throughout Europe as the seat of 
King Arthur 's Court along with his Knights of the 
Round Table. Shakespeare must have heard that 
legend dozens of times in his youth, for it was cur- 
rent everywhere around him ; then in London dur- 
ing his manhood he could hardly have escaped 
some acquaintance with Sir Thomas Malory's 
Morte D' Arthur, a much-read romance of the Ar- 



406 SSAKESPE ABE'S LIFE-DEAMA. 

thurian circle, and then already a quarry for poets, 
as recently for Tennyson and others. But Shake- 
speare seems to shun the great Welsh Mythus 
throughout his entire works, making to it only a 
very few brief allusions, and those rather comtempt- 
uous. And yet the Arthurian legend has shown its 
perdurable vitality, for it is still creative to-day in 
the poetry of Europe and even of America. 

The Second Part of Henry IV. This middle 
play of the Trilogy takes a big drop both in ex- 
ternal interest as well as inner worth, when com- 
pared with the preceding First Part. Still the 
general theme is carried forward to its conclusion: 
the political revolt headed by the Percys is com- 
pletely suppressed through established authority, 
while the moral revolt incorporate ir- Falstaff and 
the wassailers of Boar's Head loses much of its 
power through the Prince's conversion and recon- 
ciliation with the King, his father, after his final 
frolic at Eastcheap. Such is, in general, the sweep 
of the whole drama, wherein we may catch the pres- 
ent conservative attitude of the poet toward the 
existent order. 

By way of contrast we shall cite what may be 
deemed the play's strongest passage, which ex- 
presses in mighty words the universally destructive 
spirit of rebellion, as voiced by the old revolter 
Northumberland, whose son Hotspur has already 
perished in treason's assault upon the constituted 
government : 



SECOND PAST OF EENBT IV. 407 

Now let not Nature's hand 
Keep the wild flood confined ! let order die, 
And let this world no longer be a stage 
To feed contention in a lingering act ! 
But let one spirit of the first born Cain 
Reign in all bosoms, that, each heart being set 
On bloody courses, the rude scene may end 
And darkness be the burier of the dead ! 

Thus the aged anarch frantically invokes the 
grand cataclysm to overtake the world and its or- 
der, and prays that the spirit of Cain, the first 
brother-murderer, may "reign in all bosoms". 
These lines, in their sound, style, and meaning, re- 
call the defiant trumpet blast of Marlowe, who also 
sank down to death in revolt against the world's 
order. And Shakespeare himself once shared in 
this challenge of the established State with its 
kingship. But here he sees to it that the present 
monarch, though once a throne-getter through 
Percy's rebellion, now turns about and puts down 
Percy's rebellion, reversing himself indeed, but 
vindicating his new-won authority. Thus the 
"wrong of revolution is undone through the deed, by 
the former revolutionary himself, who puts a stop 
to further revolutionizing after the success of his 
own. Still, as if in response to this outer fortune, 
he has a fearful inner backstroke of conscience. 

But when we have properly adjusted everything 
and everybody, the great outstanding character of 
this play, indeed the central culminating problem 



408 SHAKESPEARE'S LIFE-DBAMA 

of the whole Trilogy is Falstaff. For he brings up 
a peculiar contradiction : he is the poet 's supreme 
comic creation, and yet he turns out tragic, as if the 
very goal and outcome of Corned}^ were Tragedy. 
Falstaff is endowed with high mental gifts, yet he 
uses them as means or even as slaves for his lower 
nature. Spirit in him is turned upside down, be- 
ing made servant to what it ought to master. Dante 
would have figured him as a monster, half -human, 
half-bestial, and have whelmed him down into the 
infernal circle of gluttons or liars. Moreover Fal- 
staff has built a world out of himself like himself, 
with its inmates negative to all moral subordination. 
Eastcheap is a kind of Dante's Inferno with its 
living active Satan. 

And yet Falstaff is a pathetic character from the 
start, and he continually begs for human sympathy. 
He is full of penitential spasms, on account of 
which trait he has been dubbed by his hardened 
companions as Monsieur Remorse. At times his 
voice trembles, and he seems ready to weep over 
himself for his sad infirmities. He as it were 
glimpses his own fate, and sheds a tear at his own 
tragedy, which he forefeels approaching. To be 
sure, his changes are very rapid : in a moment he 
turns ^'from praying to purse-taking", from com- 
punction to Sir John Sack-and-Sugar, from Saint 
to Satan. 

In Shakespeare's Comedies proper, as already 
considered, the comic fact lies outside the person- 
ality or the self of the dramatic character; it is 



SECOND PAET OF EENBY IV. 409 

some outer mistake of the senses (as in the Errors), 
or some inner mistake of the mind, as foible, folly, 
frailty (for instance that of conceited Malvolio, 
shrewish Catherine, love-scouting Benedict). This 
is what the general course of the comic action has 
to eliminate, and so to leave the former victim free 
of his failing or of his absurdity. But in the case 
of Falstaff, the personality itself gets involved and 
becomes comic, ridiculous, self -undoing ; the very 
soul tends to be one universal human frailty, which 
makes absurd and irrational its own existence. 
Honor, conscience, repentance, the most earnest ef- 
forts of man's spirit for self-recovery after the 
lapse through folly and sin, turn to a laugh, to an 
effervescent bubble of humor in Falstaff's religion. 
Yet he is no hypocrite, no skeptic, no blasphemer, 
but a believer with strong self-condemnation for his 
perverted life, and with intermittent lofty resolu- 
tions for amendment : " I '11 purge and leave sack 
and live cleanly, as a nobleman should do." 

At this deepest point of character, he stands in 
pronounced contrast to his young comi)anion Prince 
Henry, who sincerely repents, confesses his derelic- 
tions, and begins a new life, turning away from 
Falstaff's Satanic fascination. For the old sinner 
was undoubtedly a charmer, and si ill is to-day. 
Also the King is deeply troubled in conscience for 
his past actions, especially for his deed done to 
Richard II ; he openly confesses his guilt and will 
seek absolution through a crusade to the Holy 
Sepulchre. Verily that royal household has become 



410 SEAKESPE ABE'S LIFE-DBAMA. 

the home of prayer, penitence, atonement; both 
father and son are showing the broken and contrite 
heart with promise of repentance and regeneration. 

Now the enigmatic fact confronts us that Falstaff 
is going through quite the same penitent process, 
and yet overmaking it all to comedy, doing so not 
in mockery but by the very necessity of his nature. 
Why this supreme comic development just here 
and now? Falstaff is a product of the time; the 
whole sensuous element of man breaks loose in him 
and goes on a universal spree; all things fixed, es- 
tablished, hallowed melt to pieces in his soul's dis- 
solution, which condition springs not from hate or 
even ridicule, but from a kind of love, whose very 
law is to break the law while acknowledging it as 
his dearest conviction. 

Thus Falstaff is limned as the antitype of the 
King in the deepest throes of his spirit — in contri- 
tion, confession, repentance. Medieval legend 
called the devil God's ape; Falstaff too imitates, 
almost parodies, the divine process of redemption, 
not as scoffer or denier (like Goethe's Mephisto- 
pheles) but as believer. The outer form he knows 
and repeats ; the inner life, the soul' s reality is not 
his, and hence in his present state he cannot repent 
— he is fated. 

So it comes that his body, his external shape cor- 
responds to his character. He is in contour a huge 
bubble, which is nature's laugh rising into the air 
and exploding fitfully, sometimes with a detonation, 
into nothingness. Such is the supreme comic out- 



SECOND PAET OF HENBY IV. 4II 

come. Visibly he is all abdomen, with bottomless 
appetite for sack and capon, which however, is 
capped with a brain ever-spraying fresh humor 
whose empty though iridescent globules flash out 
and then burst into the universal void. Nature 
herself in his overflowing organism turns to a seen 
comedy, which already in advance laughs at what 
he is going to say, giving the cue to the listener. 
Thus body and mind play the same part together 
for eye-sight and insight. 

In such fashion we seek to conceive the place of 
the Fat Knight in the author's long and deep ex- 
perience of life. Shakespeare unfolded into Fal- 
staff and Falstaffianism, and then out of him and 
his Pandemonium of Eastcheap. For the poet not 
only saw that bright human bubble of evanescence 
in outward inflated shape (some have thought they 
could point to the very man), but he felt the Fal- 
staffian consciousness in his own self, in the evolu- 
tion of his own comic genius. So he deepens Com- 
edy to its ultimate profoundest turning-point 
where it reaches its own self-annulment, in which 
we behold the outcome and the conclusion of the 
poet's Happy Sexennium. Comedy is pushed to 
the point of being comic to itself in Falstaff — 
ridiculous, absurd, self -negative, a bursted bubble. 

Henry Y. This third and last play of the Tril- 
ogy is its culmination, assuredly not in poetic ex- 
cellence but in that re-actionary conservative 
tendency which we have already noticed as the 
tone-giving characteristic of the poet's present 



412 SEAKESPE ABE'S LIFE-DBAMA. 

Epoch. Prince Hal, now crowned King Henry V, 
is transformed into the most devoted supporter of 
those two supreme institutions, Church and State, 
both of which he as a youth not simply disregarded 
but openly set at defiance. And it seems that he 
has not alone accepted them tamely as something 
transmitted in the line of his office, but he has 
studied them profoundly, having become quite 
suddenly learned both in theology and politics, the 
sciences of Church and State. For listen to the 
Archbishop of Canterbury, a good judge of such 
doctrinal qualities: 

Hear him but reason in divinity 

And all-admiring, with an inward wish 

You would desire the king were made a prelate ; 

Hear him debate of commonwealth affairs. 

You would say it hath been all his study. 

And to like extent skilled practically does he ap- 
pear in war and administration : 

So that the art and practic part of life 
Must be the mistress of this theoric. 

How and when did the young Prince ever get so 
much knowledge, is now the sudden problem. For 
nobody ever "noted in him any study", since his 
hours were ' ' filled up with riots, banquets, sports ' ', 
his boon associates being ''unlettered, rude, and 
shallow", such as those delectable denizens of East- 
cheap. Well may the good Archbishop wonder at 
this unexpected lore of a youth who seemed to turn 



HENBY V. 413 

away from all labors of the student ; and the enigma 
remains even after the Bishop of Ely has added his 
illustrative text: "The strawberry grows under- 
neath the nettle" — so the young Prince grew ''un- 
der the veil of wildness". But the interest for us 
now is that Shakespeare himself underwent some 
such change, seemingly not so rapid, while the 
problem of his erudition still haunts not a few of 
his readers who dazedly inquire: Through what 
strange channel could have come all that learning 
of his? One well-known answer is: he was not 
himself but Bacon. 

Another singular characteristic of this drama is 
the stress which it puts upon genealogy, inherited 
titles, legitimacy. Indeed the whole war with 
France pivots on a pedigree — a fatal pedigree, as 
it turns out, even with the victory of Agincourt. 
In all Shakespeare there is nothing so utterly un- 
poetical, so mentally desolate as that long genea- 
logical list which is supposed to justify Henry's 
title to the French crown. One begins to think of 
Walt Whitman's broad spaces of sandy rigmarole. 
Such dry heraldry may have charm for the rank- 
loving English, but it simply mummifies the Ameri- 
can reader. Still we may start up some interest in 
this desiccated part of Shakespeare if we find that 
it has a place, though small, in his life's whole 
journey. Accordingly we learn that just during 
the years of his composing this Trilogy (1596-9) 
he was engaged in a prolonged attempt to obtain a 
coat-of-arms, and thus to become a titular English 



414 SHAKESPE ABE'S LIFE-DBAMA. 

Gentleman. In fact the year when he at last re- 
ceived his title after quite a little battle, was 1599, 
which is usually given as the date of his writing 
the present drama. So we may think that gene- 
alogy was a special experience, or perchance hobby 
of his at this time, and became interwoven in his 
Life-drama, whereof the lasting mark was stamped 
on Henry V. And it should be added that the pur- 
chase of New Place, his gentlemanly residence at 
Stratford belongs to this same genealogical time 
(1597). Underneath all these superficialities we 
may discern Shakespeare's present trend toward 
the transmitted, the conventional, the titled in his 
environing social system. 

And now in this drama we are again brought 
face to face with the character whose true place 
is in the heart of the whole Trilogy — Falstaff— 
who seems to many readers not to get his right 
treatment here at the close. Ought not the peni- 
tent Knight to be saved as well as the penitent 
Prince? There is no doubt that his would have 
been a far greater work if the poet had known how 
to redeem Falstaff along with Hal, despite their 
difference of age and rank. And it is equally cer- 
tain that the Prince would have shown a far loftier 
character if he had taken his old devoted com- 
panion in sin with himself over into his new ethical 
life. There is something harsh if not inhuman in 
the way in which the converted Prince banishes 
from his presence his once nearest friend and fel- 
low-worker in evil ways. 



HE NET V. 415 

But is Falstaff redeemable? I think it is indi- 
cated where his chief psychical defect lies: in his 
Will. He often shows the contrite heart (contritio 
cordis) and often confesses plaintively his failings 
(confessio oris), but he could not fulfil that last 
stage of the penitential process in the corresponding 
deed (satisf actio operis). The least temptation or 
suggestion was to him an irresistible lure, and 
would spin him off into lying, thieving, sack-guz- 
zling, after which would start another paroxysm 
of repentance. Still it is not to be forgotten that 
he amid all his excesses feels the backstroke of con- 
science, and then drops into one of his penitential 
effervescences, which, however, have no power of 
cleansing his life. So he is left to his fate by his 
comrade, the Prince, and also by his poet, Shake- 
speare, both of whom appear to deem him the doer 
of the irremissible sin. 

Such we must hold to be the poet's present view 
of his erring fellow-man, which indicates the stage 
he has so far reached in his spirit's development — 
somewhat limited, not yet fully freed of the pre- 
scribed fetters of his age. It is true that Shake- 
speare cannot now redeem his transcendent repro- 
bate, who therefore has to stay unregenerate and 
damned. But the time will come when the poet is 
to win the power of rescuing Falstaff, as he does a 
worse man, Leontes, and when finally he will save 
through repentance even Caliban, a Dantesque mon- 
ster, half-human, half-bestial — seemingly the last 
dramatic deed of his life, set forth on the last page 



416 SHAKESPE ABE'S LIFE-DBAMA. 

of his last play. But that fulfilment lies far ahead 
of his present state of evolution, in a wholly new 
Period of his creative energy, which we have called 
his redemptive time. But this completed realisa- 
tion of the poet comes long after the present drama, 
and can only take place when he has passed through 
the experience of his tragic Period, which is like- 
wise yet to be. 

We still go back and ask: In what lay Fal- 
staff's charm for the young Prince? Somewhat 
parallel runs the question : In what lay Marlowe 's 
charm for the young Shakespeare ? Genius is com- 
mon to both and a transcendent power of self- 
expression; but their deepest fascination lies else- 
where. Both Falstaff and Marlowe were members 
and indeed makers of that negative, perverted 
world, which is the night-side or the unsunned half 
of humanity; and that is just what Prince Henry 
and Shakespeare must know and experience in or- 
der to be and to realize the whole man in their own 
manhood. Call it the old Serpent's temptation, 
Adam's fall, or the soul's first love for Lilith, the 
enchantress or the Dark Lady; the poet and his 
prince are going to test in its full actuality the 
grand cosmical dualism of good and evil, master it, 
or perish. 

In fact, Marlowe seems alluded to in an early 
passage of this Trilogy, which recalls the pivotal 
fact of his most characteristic play, his Faustus: 
"Jack, how agrees the devil and thee about thy 
soul that thou soldest to him on Good Friday last 



EENEY V. 417 

for a eup of Madeira and a cold capon's leg?" 
(First Henry IV. Act 1. Sc. 2). So Falstaff too 
has bartered his sonl to the Devil for appetite's 
sake in imitation of Faust's agreement with Me- 
phistopheles — probably a wild scene from Mar- 
lowe's drama mimicked by Falstaff in the pothouse 
at Eastcheap blasphemously "on Good Friday 
last". And the Prince forecasts the outcome: 
"Sir John stands to his word, the Devil shall have 
his bargain", and take his own. No salvation for 
him according to the Prince and Marlowe, and also 
according to the present Shakespeare, who will 
voice Falstaff's final condemnation through the 
same Prince Henry when the latter gets to be king. 
Thus it would seem that Shakespeare 's Falstaff has 
one or more lines of derivation from Marlowe's 
Faustus, which character itself springs of the su- 
preme Teutonic Mythus of the bargain with the 
Devil. 

Still the Prince with all his keen twitting had 
strong affection for Falstaff, whom he really de- 
manded for his completed discipline. When he 
sighs : "I could have better spared a better man ' ', 
he confesses not only his love but also his need of 
the Fat Knight whose society, or rather whose 
schooling, he was not yet quite ready to do without. 
(End of First Henry IV). "What was the want, or 
perchance the gap which Falstaff filled in his life? 
Not merely amusement but training he received; 
Falstaff 's school was for him that of the World 
Perverted, and also that of the Will Perverted; 



418 SHAKESPEAEE'S LIFE-DEAMA 

he was getting through Falstaff's unique pedagogy 
to be aware of himself, of his fellow-man, and of 
his future vocation, as ruler. Sense of loss one 
may hear in his deep suspiration over his teacher's 
supposed death: 

What, old acquaintance ! could not all this flesh 
Keep in a little life ! Poor Jack, farewell ! 
Oh I should have a heavy miss of thee 
If I were much in love with vanity ! 

So he looks back with pensive fondness, yet hints 
his spirit's change already setting in away from 
his "vanity". The words breathe forth so heart- 
felt and expressive that we may catch in them the 
voice of the poet himself giving a brief retrospect 
of his experience, as he flashes his look backward 
upon this present Epoch now about to close. 

Falstaff is tragic, but not bloodily so ; he is not 
slain by violence upon the stage, as was the case in 
the poet's early tempestuous dramas (Titus, Rich- 
ard HI). Exactly what to do with the Fat Knight 
at his career's close seems to have given some 
trouble to the poet, who could not kill him off as a 
villain or save him as a penitent. Broken by the 
King's harsh reproof and dismissal, Falstaff goes 
back to his early fellow-bibbers in Eastcheap where 
he will die without saying a word of blame. From 
these sympathetic friends we get some throbbing 
echoes of what has happened to him: "the King 
has killed his heart", says the Hostess once known 
under the name of Dame Quickly. And Pistol evi- 



HENEY V. 419 

dently will convey the same meaning in his pom- 
pous Latinized jargon: "His heart is fraeted and 
corroborate". Thus Falstaff is made to die of a 
broken heart, seemingly the only instance in Shake- 
speare, with the possible exception of Kent in King 
Lear. The question pushes up even in East cheap : 
Where is he now? The funeral sermon is preached 
over him by the lowly woman there, who says of 
Falstaff: "Nay, sure he is not in hell; he's in 
Arthurs 's (Abraham's) bosom, if ever man went to 
Arthur's bosom. He made a finer end and went 
away, an it had been any christom child". So 
speaks in her pathetic patois the forgiving Hostess, 
for she has had much to complain of in her various 
dealings with her long-trusted customer, who was 
so gifted with wit and abdomen and impecuniosity. 
Lines of heroism she shows which the heroic King 
himself has not, and she seems dimly prophetic of 
the coming final Shakespeare, when he will be able 
to redeem even a Falstaff, who undoubtedly re- 
quires a longer, profounder, more searching disci- 
pline than the poet can now give him, without some 
newer and deeper-reaching experience of his own. 

In about ten years from the conclusion of this 
play, as we score the time, the poet will unfold into 
his final remedial Period, when he will show a per- 
vading bias, or rather a settled passion for redeem- 
ing his own damned of his former dramas. Thus 
he will rise beyond his retributive self into the 
soul's mediatorial realm, of which we may feel the 
mood and catch the word in Winter's Tale. Then 



420 SRAKESPE ABE'S LIFE-DEAMA 

he will have transcended his present heroic model, 
and outstripped his once idealized alter ego, Henry 
V, into a new stage of his Life-drama, having at- 
tained the love and the fulfilment to be a savior 
instead of a destroyer. 

But before this concluding redemptive time, 
which will be his Third Period, and in towering 
contrast with the same, Shakespeare is to pass 
through the darkest, deepest, woefullest, yet 
mightiest upburst of his genius, which constitutes 
the Second Period of his Life-drama, that of his 
great tragedies. Such is the truly Olympian age of 
his creativity, into which Henry V opens a lead 
better than any other of his plays. For its all-hailed 
triumphant hero necessarily called up his son and 
successor, the weak, ill-fated, tragic Henry VI, to 
the mind of the poet who had already, ten or a 
dozen years before, written or helped to write the 
sad Trilogy of that will-less monarch's woes. Ver- 
ily the latter 's hapless lot was ever present and 
deeply seething in the soul of Shakespeare during 
the incubation and composition of his Henry V, 
being often suggested in the drama itself, and di- 
rectly, even emphatically expressed in its last six 
lines : 

Henry the Sixth in infant bands crowned king 
Of France and England, did this king succeed ; 

Whose state so many had the managing 

That they lost France and made his England 
bleed ; 



HENBY V. 421 

Which oft our stage hath shown; and for their 

sake 
In your fair minds let this (play) acceptance 

take. 

In this passage the poet as with a low under- 
breath hints of the awful nemesis of Agincourt 
turned back upon England — a great triumph for 
Henry V, but a greater calamity for his heir Henry 
VI ; a sudden victory for a day, a lasting defeat for 
all time. Such was the maddened irony of History 
which Shakespeare could not help realizing men- 
tally in its full intensity, as he crushed his over- 
flowing soul through his penpoint into the manu- 
script of this drama of Henry V. We may hearken 
him pouring forth his very selfhood into the prayer 
of the King just before the fight of Agincourt, as 
the latter cries out in agonizing supplication "0 
God of battles ' ', he being wrung with the presenti- 
ment of coming retribution now due to his family 
on account of its blood-guilt toward Richard II : 

Not to-day, Lord— 

not to-day, think not upon tho fault 
My father made in compassing the crown ! 

1 Ki chard 's body have interred new. 

And on it have bestowed more contrite tears 
Than issued from it forced drops of blood. 

So that original deed of wrong has propagated it- 
self along with the royal inheritance in the heir 
who now seeks to countervail its curse by peniten- 
tial works : 



422 SHAKESPE ABE'S LIFE-DBAMA 

Five hundred poor I have in yearly pay 
Who twice a-day their withered hands hold up 
Toward Heaven, to pardon blood — 

blood spilled in that heinous crime against an an- 
nointed king, such as I am now. Still further runs 
the atonement: 

And I have built 

Two chantries where sad and solemn priests 

Still sing for Richard's soul. 

But that is not enough ; nay, it is quite impossible 
now to do adequate penance for the remission of 
such a Heaven-defying sin : 

More will I do; 
Though all that I can do is nothing worth, 
Since that my penitence comes after all, 
Imploring pardon. 

Why this closing note of despair? Evidently the 
King is not yet ready to make complete the full 
process of repentance, which lacks the final act of 
renunciation and restitution, that of surrendering 
all the gain of the evil deed (the satisf actio operis). 
At this point we may well listen, for the sake of 
its added emphasis, to a similar thrill of anguish 
in the nearly cotemporaneous Hamlet drama, in 
which there appears another King (Claudius) who 
in prayer beseeches forgiveness without the full 
reparation for his guilty deed : 

Forgive me my foul murder! — 
That cannot be, since I am still possessed 



HEN BY V. 423 

Of those effects for which I did the murder — 
My crown, mine own ambition, and my queen. 
May one be pardoned and retain the offence? — 

Tis not so above. — 

Thus the two Kings, of England and of Den- 
mark, confess their common failure in the work of 
, atonement for their transgression. 

Through his repetition of such despairful con- 
trition sprung of misdoing, we have to question 
Shakespeare himself if he ever experienced these 
racking throes of conscience which he has so subtly 
yet so mightily expressed in his hero? Surely not 
for any blood-guilt, there is no evidence of that red 
dye against him ; still his transgression he must 
have felt with all his deeply poetic sensitiveness 
and imagination, and have suffered paroxysms of 
remorse so that he would often cry out through the 
mask of his characters : 

May one be pardoned and retain the offence? 
Try what repentance can; what can it not? 
Yet what can it when one cannot repent ? 
wretched state ! bosom black as death ! 
limed soul — 

So the blood-guilty Danish king agonizes when he 
summons before his own judgment-seat the final 
necessary act for completing his repentance, but 
left undone. Now the poet in more than one Son- 
net voices himself to be in a similar condition, using 
directly the first person, as in Sonnet 120 : 



424 SHAKESPE ABE'S LIFE-DBAMA. 

And for that sorrow which I then did feel 
Needs must I under my transgression bow, 
Unless my nerves were brass or hammered steel. 
For if you were by my unkindness shaken, 
As I by yours, you've passed a Hell of Time— 

(not quite the same as our petty profanity, a hell 
of a time, since it suggests all Time turned to a 
a Hell). Thus the poet gives us brief glimpses into 
his personal Inferno with its tortures of rem- 
iniscence. 

Such is King Henry V just before Agincourt 
racked by conscience, yet revealing his loftiest 
and worthiest in the very pinch of his sorest trial. 
But after Agincourt what will be his behavior, 
when the overwhelming and unexpected victory has 
been won? It must be acknowledged that he de- 
teriorates in success, he sinks to a far lower level 
of character in the very uplift of his triumph. He 
woos and weds Katherine the daughter of the 
French King, with a flippancy and downright 
mockery, not to speak of indelicacy, which causes 
the shocked reader to wince and wonder what such 
an abrupt descent from his spirit's grandeur can 
mean. In this respect the Fifth Act quite reverses 
and drags down the heavenly-thoughted Fourth 
Act to an equality with the ribaldry of Boar's 
Head. So we now hear the victorious young Mon- 
arch make unlovely love to his forthcoming roj^al 
spouse : ' ' Shall not thou and I, between Saint 
Denis and Saint George, compound a boy, half 



SONNETS c^OMIG) 425 

French half English, that shall go to Constanti- 
nople and take the Turk by the beard?" Thus we 
are reminded to see again Prince Hal obscenely 
joking with Falstaff at Eastcheap in the presence 
of Doll Tearsheet. 

But what must the poet have recalled and felt 
piercing through his soul as he drew such a gro- 
tesque picture? He had already portrayed and 
had often seen acted "on our stage" the reign of 
that "boy half English half French", Henry VI, 
who, instead of being able to "take the Turk by 
the beard" in Constantinople, will be dethroned, 
imprisoned and done to death in London- — the last 
act of the long Lancastrian tragedy. And this so 
lovelessly wooed and wedded Katherine, will be 
succeeded by Margaret, "the she-wolf of France", 
who is turned loose upon England whose people 
will be harried deathward through her ambition 
and cruelty, in a kind of secret retribution for 
what they have done to her country. She becomes 
the incarnate Nemesis of Agincourt for the con- 
queror, which victory is thus the grand English- 
historical tragedy in Shakespeare, who therewith 
personally seems to be passing over into his new 
tragic Period. 

For this reason the student of Shakespearian 
biography will ponder anew these last two Acts of 
King Henry V, especially in their relation to the 
succeeding historic Trilogy of King Henry VI, to 
catch some glimpses into the deepest and darkest 
node of the poet's Life-drama. Thus we behold 



426 SHAKESPEARE'S LIFE-DEAMA 

him in one vray returning upon himself, going 
backward and connecting with his earliest work; 
but in another and far profounder way we are to 
trace him moving forward into the new and su- 
preme stage of his career. Still with him we must 
share the pang of it, for by the necessity of his 
spirit's development, his Happy Sexennium he has 
now to leave behind, and start to live his mightily 
tragic Period in the very creation of his mightiest 
Tragedies. 

III. 

Sonnets. 

Let the observant reader here take note that we 
again pick up the Sonnets as a continuous strand 
of Shakespeare 's life and of its expression. A part 
of them belong to the present Epoch ; indeed a 
number of commentators throw all of them into 
these six years (1594-1600) ; yea, there are several 
expounders who would confine the entire series 
within some three years of this Sexennium — a great 
mistake to our thinking, but fortunately as yet not 
very contagious. 

Accordingly, we shall here re-affirm that these 
Sonnets are primarily to be looked at as a poetic 
diary which reaches through many years of vary- 
ing experiences, a score of them probably, and 
which definitely terminates in 1609, the date of 
their publication. Also they mirror the personal 
side of the poet — his multifarious stages of devel- 
opment both in his spirit and in his art, as well as 



SONNETS (COMIC) 427 

his lighter moods and caprices. At times they 
seem a mere external sport, or versified gimcrack, 
with mystification enough; but at their best they 
utter the deepest thoughts as well as the most pas- 
sionate throbs of Shakespeare's soul. Above all, 
they reflect in their total sweep the inner psychical 
movement of the poet's Life-drama. 

So it comes that we shall endeavor to show in 
the present Epoch the small private stream of Son- 
nets running along with or perchance underneath 
the full tide of the public Dramas, and forming 
the lyrical more internal counterpart to the more 
external dramative element, which has been set 
forth in the foregoing account of Comedies and 
Histories, eleven plays all told. There is no inten- 
tion here to select all the Sonnets which may be 
assigned to this Epoch, but simply to choose a few 
characteristic ones which will illustrate its leading 
phases. 

I. The first point which has been repeatedly 
emphasized is that this is Shakespeare's recon- 
ciled, distinctively harmonious time, more than any 
other of his entire life. Hence we have entitled it 
his Happ3^ Sexennium, during which he writes no 
tragedy, but gives to his plays a happy outcome on 
the whole, even if some characters, like Hotspur, 
fall by the wayside in the sweep of the action. Now 
this salient feature of the Epoch is decidedly 
marked in some of the Sonnets, which seem, there- 
fore, to represent the poet's prevailing mood as 
well as his world-view at this time. 



428 SHAKESPE ABE'S LIFE-DEAMA 

Of course the chief poetical theme as well as the 
all-embracing emotion of the poet is love, of which 
the unity, constancy, and deep contentment find ex- 
pression in the following Sonnet (105) : 

Let not my love be called idolatry, 
Nor my beloved as an idol show. 
Since all alike my songs and praises be 
To one, of one, still such and ever so. 
Kind is my love to-day, to-morrow kind, 
Still constant in a wondrous excellence; 
Therefore my verse, to constancy confined, 
One thing expressing, leaves out difference. 

Such we may take as a sort of motto to the Sexen- 
nium, in which the poet's verse sets to music the 
oneness and the concordance of the world and of 
himself. In the second part of the same Sonnet, 
he gives his theme a new peculiar turn, which may 
be called Platonic, since it recalls a famous tri- 
plicity of the old Greek philosopher known in our 
later English as the True, the Beautiful, and the 
Good, which, however, are together attuned to the 
same underlying monochord of felicity: 

Fair, kind, and true, is all my argument, — 
Fair, kind, and true, varying to other words; 
And in this change is my invention spent, 
Three themes in one, which wondrous scope 

affords. 
Fair, kind, and true, have often lived alone. 
Which three till now, never kept seat in one. 



SONNETS (COMIC) 429 

This curious item we may regard as Shakespeare's 
own philosophic summary, in abstract rhymed 
speech, of his writings during this Epoch, for it 
will hardly apply so well to any other time of his 
life. The foregoing "three themes in one" show 
now the conscious, reflective purpose of the poet, 
who thus suddenly turns philosopher in thought 
and nomenclature, affirming their ''wondrous 
scope" in his works and their "varying to other 
words ' ' in his various dramas, for instance. So we 
may in this subtly significant passage detect Shake- 
speare affirming that the True, Beautiful and Good 
"is all my argument", the content of all my poetry 
in my present stage of mind, which (we may here 
forecast) will soon change with a tremendous re- 
bound the other way. 

One other little bit with a somewhat different 
turn may be here set down, in which the -poet pro- 
tests his constancy and return after some ab- 
sence (109) : 

never say that I was false of heart. 
Though absence seemed my flame to qualify. 
As easy might I from myself depart 
As from my soul which in thy breast doth lie : 
That is my home of love. — 

Perhaps here we catch an early glimpse of the 
Dark Lady whose nameless nebulous shape fleets off 
and on through the whole line of these Sonnets, 
striking in him the full gamut of his emotional 
nature from love's bliss to its last damnation. 



430 SHAKESPE ABE'S LIFE-DEAMA. 

II. The second leading characteristic which has 
been stressed as strongly marking the present 
Epoch, is the poet's reaction from his former wild 
life and revolt against the established institutional 
order, which revolt he had not only lived but also 
represented in his earlier writings. Still now he 
has turned away from the influence of the anti- 
social Marlowe and from the wild comradery of 
poetic world-stormers, and has become the defender 
of tradition and its institutions, confessing his 
previous lapse with a note of penitential sorrow, 
but also proclaiming his present recovery- (Sonnet 
110) : 

Alas! 'tis true, I have gone (ill) here and there, 

And made myself a motley to the view. 

Gored mine own thoughts, sold cheap what is 

most dear, 
Made old offenses of affections new; 
Most true it is that I have looked on truth 
Askance and strangely; — but by all above, 
These blenches gave my heart another youth, 
And worse essays proved thee my best of love. 
Now all is done, (I) have what shall have no 

end. — 

Many different interpretations have been given of 
these lines; but whatever may be their special 
meaning, they show one clear unmistakeable pur- 
port : the poet 's deep-toned regret over his former 
time of transgression, and his turn to a new stage 
of life, to "another youth" in heart and in crea- 



SONNETS (COMIC) 431 

tion. Moreover the word motley seems a hint of his 
dramatic work, which he confesses to have prosti- 
tuted to gain, or to applause, and thus to "have 
gored his own thoughts, sold cheap what is most 
dear". Still he has risen out of that time of 
eclipse, rejuvenated seemingly just through these 
"blenches", or aberrations of conduct. So he has 
won by experience a higher point of life's renewal, 
which we may identify as his Happy Sexennium, 
both in his soul and in his work. 

It should be noted that the foregoing nine lines, 
penetrating, transparent, and profoundly intercon- 
nected, are followed by five lines of quite the op- 
posite character, apparently to make up the full 
quatorzain. The same difficulty will often puzzle 
the reader, and perhaps drive him to think that the 
single Sonnet within its own little confine can at 
times show as much disorder and lack of inner con- 
tinuity as the whole body of Sonnets. Especially 
does there seem to have been a lurking temptation 
to tag on to a bright jet of perspicuous and fluid 
verse an obscure and quite worthless padding, that 
the number of lines be stretched out to the regular 
quota of fourteen. 

III. Love, under one form or other, must be 
deemed the dominant principle or energy of the 
present Epoch, being specially manifested and 
made real in its eight Comedies. ' ' The marriage of 
true minds ' ' in man and woman is the grand partu- 
rient comic theme, bringing forth the ultimate har- 
mony, the most lasting reconciliation possible to 



432 SHAKESPEABE'S LIFE-DBAMA. 

this separative human individuality of ours. It 
would seem to be the visible present appearance of 
our immortal portion to Shakespeare, who hymns: 
''Love is not love which alters when it alteration 
finds", being "an ever-fixed mark", and not 
"Time's fool". 

There is no doubt that the completer incarnation 
of Love, according to our poet, is now found in the 
woman. Hence he has in this Epoch created that 
ever-marching line of female characters, at the 
head of whom rise Portia, followed by Rosalind, 
down to ' ' sweet Anne Page ' '. It is strange : in 
them we are made to feel that some of our closest 
and dearest acquaintances have never lived, that 
in Shakespeare's folk the undying soul has never 
had to pass out and over the bourne, that the re- 
incarnated spirit (by the actor) has never been in- 
carnate. All through the World's Literature as 
well as through our own lives stalk those ghostly 
yet intimate associates of ours — Hamlet, Goethe's 
Faust, Homer's Helen and also Shakespeare's 
Helena. Thus there is an overworld of ideal deni- 
zens living with us breathers, whereof Shakespeare 
may be deemed the greatest creator. 

In several Sonnets the poet has sought to express 
this Love as absolute, self-contained, truly the uni- 
versal energy in his writ. We shall cite the weight- 
iest one for the reader's oft repeatable contempla- 
tion (116) : 

Let me not to the marriage of true minds 
Admit impediments. Love is not love 



SONNETS (COMIC) 433 

Which alters when it alteration finds, 

Or bends with the remover to remove : 

0, no ! it is an ever-fixed mark, 

That looks on tempests and is never shaken; 

It is the star to every wandering bark 

Whose worth 's unknown, although his height be 

taken. 
Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and 

cheeks 
Within his bending sickle 's compass come ; 
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks, 
But bears it out even to the edge of doom. 

Very massive, lofty, and sunlike rolls the temper 
of these lines, which assert not only the constancy 
but the eternity of love in ''true minds". Yet the 
slack snapper may be heard in the same Sonnet's 
last distich, which here seems to call up Shake- 
speare looking backward at his writings and affirm- 
ing the above doctrine to be the principle of his 
composition : 

If this be error and upon me proved, 
I never writ — 

any love-plays, and furthermore T never experi- 
enced love for any human being. So we may con- 
strue this cloudy close whose nebulosity contrasts 
with the previous sunshine of the Sonnet. 

IV. Along with this return and restoration from 
his error and estrangement, the poet in the Sonnets 
gives us repeated glimpses of his philosophy of life. 



434 SHAKESPE ABE'S LIFE-DBAMA. 

The spirit's power of self -recovery after the lapse 
he proclaims with emphasis (109) : 

So that myself bring water for my stain. — 
Never believe, though in my nature reigned 
All frailties that besiege all kinds of blood, 
That it could so preposterously be stained. 

The scheme of evil not only in the world but in the 
individual wo find him jorobing to the bottom, and 
' ' creating every bad a perfect best ' '. He proclaims 
"the benefit of ill", and visions beatifically "that 
better is by evil still made better", and even from 
the hardest blow to his heart's tenderost passion he 
sings his happj' recovery (119) : 

And ruined love, when it is built anew, 
Grows fairer than at first, more strong, far 

greater. 
So I return, rebuked, to my content, 
And gain by ill thrice more than I have spent. 

Such is the desperate optimism which chants the 
lofty paean of the poet's triumph over the de- 
stroyer within and without. 

Through the dramas of this Happy Sexennium 
runs a similar strain to that of the foregoing Son- 
nets. Especially the Lancastrian Trilogy dwells 
upon the soul's dip into evil and the method of its 
restoration. Already we have emphasized the char- 
acter and career of Henry V who illustrates this 
deepest process of human experience — the descent 
into transgression and the way out. Also it has 



SONNETS (COMIC) 435 

been noted that in him the poet is recounting the 
great transition of his own soul-life, which gives 
the inner push of the present Epoch. 

Perhaps the culmination and summary of this 
whole time of the poet's new evolution we may find 
in the words of Henry V at the grand crisis just 
before the battle of Agincourt. The king, as if at 
his confessional and in presence of Eternal Truth, 
puts his highest self-expression into the form of a 
prayer : 

God Almighty ! 
There is some soul of goodness in things evil, 
Would men observingly distil it out; — 
Thus may we gather honey from the weed, 
And make a moral of the devil himself. 

Hence old Satan can be, and has been transformed 
by the transformed man, and the bad itself be- 
comes the grand means and incentive to the good : 

For our bad neighbor makes us early stirrers. 
Which is both healthful and good husbandry ; 
Besides they are our outward consciences. 
And preachers to us all, admonishing 
That we should dress us fairly for our end. 

So he would make sin a good clergyman or preacher 
whose sermon turns on the ministry of transgres- 
sion. 

Thus it is that in this poetie diary of the Sonnets 
we hear at certain places an echo of the poet's 
Happy Sexennium, of his reconciled Epoch, whose 
key-note we may catch undertoning all his writings 



436 SSAKESPE AIRE'S LIFE-DBAMA. 

during the present time. And we find the same 
general character in the external occurrences of 
his life. Even mistake, error, wrong, transgres- 
sion — all the negative phases of existence — are 
made remedial toward a higher human worthiness, 
if not perfection. 

Here a warning may be inserted. The dates of 
these Sonnets singly or in their groups have never 
been ascertained. Only one fixed time-limit for 
them as a whole is fully certified — the year 1609 
when they were first printed. Still their great dif- 
ferences of mood, thought, style, literary value, 
are not only noticeable, but demand some kind of 
correlation with the poet's entire achievement. As 
already stated, they impress themselves vividly 
upon us as the writer's intimate self-communings, 
as his heart 's confessions while passing through the 
various crises of his Life-drama. 

V. And still a subtler, deeper mystery lurks in 
these Sonnets, which we shall here merely indicate 
with brief illustration. Through quite all the 
many years of these verses fleets a baffling shape 
which is often declared by the poet to be his secret 
inspiration, his ''tenth Muse", evidently a woman 
who, after Shakespeare's own description, has been 
called The Dark Lady. In more than one Sonnet 
he has placed her at the heart of his creative 
energy, as in No. 38 : 

How can my Muse want subject to invent, 
While thou dost breathe, that pour'st into my 
verse 



SONNETS (COMIC) 437 

Thine own sweet argument, too excellent 
For every vulgar paper to rehearse? 
give thyself the thanks, if aught in me 
Worthy perusal stand against thy sight ; 
For who 's so dumb that cannot write to thee 
When thou thyself dost give invention light? 
Be thou the tenth Muse, ten times more in worth 
Than those old nine which rhymers invocate ; 
And he that calls on thee let him bring forth 
Eternal numbers that outlive long date. 
If my slight Muse do please these curious days, 
The pain be mine, but thine shall be the praise. 

May we not see in this fervent homage the real in- 
spirer of Portia and Rosalind, the living woman 
''that pour'st into my verse thine own sweet argu- 
ment"? And in the next Sonnet (39) we hear a 
like declaration: ''thou art all the better part of 
me". Of course there has been much controversy 
over this "tenth Muse"; man or woman is he or 
she — or possibly neither the one nor the other? 
Most famous of all identifications is the one made 
by Thomas Tyler, who has at least labeled her with 
a lasting name, that of Mary Fitton, though the 
correctness of it is stoutly contested. But how- 
ever named or nameless she be, the writer 's state of 
mind is not ambiguous. And that is just what the 
best reader wants to hear about, feeling in it the 
poet as he touches salient points of his biography. 

Already we have stressed Shakespeare 's devotion 
to love in general without specially designating 



438 SHAKESPE ABE'S LIFE-DBAMA 

any person as its object. Love is not "Time's 
fool" for "it alters not when it alteration finds", 
but "bears it out even to the edge of doom" (see 
preceding citation of Sonnet 116). This we may 
conceive as the i^oet's statement of his principle or 
of the law of his genius, Love universal, to which 
we can now add its particular side or Love indi- 
vidual as incarnate in this Dark Lady. For she is 
exalted to be the one original source whence spring 
all his diversified creations, for instance in Son- 
net 53 : 

Describe Adonis and the counterfeit 

Is poorly imitated after you; 

On Helen's cheek all art of beauty set. 

And you in Grecian tires are painted new: 

Speak of the spring and foison of the year, 

The one doth shadow of your beauty show, 

The other as your bounty doth appear — 

And you in every blessed shape we know. 

In all external grace you have some part. 

But you like none, none you, for constant heart. 

This sets up you as the creative ideal which utters 
itself through the poet in all beautiful and bounti- 
ful appearances of art and nature. But who is this 
youf That is the burning question of the Sonnets 
yesterday and still to-day, whereto all sorts of 
answers have been given. Ours is: You are the 
Dark Lady, deeply veiled in your pronominal dis- 
guise here as elsewhere, while I, the self-revealing 
poet, William Shakespeare, unmask myself to the 
sunlight in every line. 



SONNETS (COMIC) 439 

Such is in general the mood of unclouded bliss 
expressing Shakespeare's happy love during this 
Happy Sexennium. But even in its sheen certain 
deep-shaded rifts are starting to make themselves 
felt and sung, wherein his radiant felicity begins 
to show streaks of the coming eclipse. A highly 
ecstasied example of this change from love's pure 
sun-up to its hurried obscuration is given in Son- 
net No. 33 : 

Full many a glorious Morning have I seen 
Flatter the mountain tops with sovereign eye, 
Kissing with golden face the meadows green, 
Gilding pale streams with heavenly alchemy — 
Anon permit the basest clouds to ride 
With ugly rack on his celestial face. 
And from the forlorn world his visage hide 
Stealing unseen to West with this disgrace : 
Even so my Sun one early morn did shine 
With all-triumphant splendor on my brow; 
But out ! alack ! He was but one hour mine 
The region cloud hath masked Him for me now. 

So Love's luminary begins to grow dim till it dark- 
ens to deepest tragedy, whose midnight act, how- 
ever, lies beyond the present Epoch. As usual 
there has been a deadly difference of opinion over 
that little pronoun he — what, whom does it stand 
for — literal Sun, Love, some man (Pembroke, 
Southampton etc.), some woman (the Dark Lady, 
or still another) 1 But whatever be the answer, the 
psychical change from felicity to gloom is brought 



440 SHAKESPE ABE'S LIFE-DEAMA. 

out with telling strokes, and that is the main point 
with the poet, who lets himself glow forth to the 
full while the other is persistently kept masked 
under a cloud. 

A further stage in this reciprocal tangle of heart- 
throes may be found in the next Sonnet (34) : 

'Tis not enough that through the cloud thou 

break, 
To dry the rain on my storm-beaten face, 
For no man well of such a salve can speak 
That heals the wound and cures not the disgrace : 
Though thou repent, yet I have still the loss, 
The offender's sorrow lends but weak relief 
To him that bears the strong offense's cross. 
Ah! but those tears are pearl which thy love 

sheds, 
And they are rich, and ransom all ill deed§. 

Still the poet now will accept "those tears" (hardly 
shed for him by a noble Lord like Southampton, 
easily by a repentantly weeping woman), and will 
make them "ransom all ill deeds". So reconcilia- 
tion comes to the pair, as at the end of the comedy. 
But the crisis will arrive hereafter when the wound 
of infidelity cuts too deep for restoration, so that 
the poet will cause tragic blood to spill from the 
faithless woman's heart, at least on the stage. 

Through such choosing from this diamond heap 
of tumbled sonnets — flawless and flawed — we put 
together a little anthology which seeks to mirror 
the varying turns of Shakespeare's Happy Sexen- 



SONNETS (COMIC) 441 

nium, thus paralleling his other larger public work 
with a small private undercurrent of confession 
taken from his poetic diary. It may be repeated 
that the first personal pronoun in these sonnets is 
Shakespeare undisguised, hence directly self-reveal- 
ing, while the other pronouns wear masks quite im- 
penetrable, and I believe so intended by the poet. 

After such manner the three literary forms of 
this final Epoch of Shakespeare 's Apprenticeship — 
Comedies, Histories, Sonnets — are to be co-ordi- 
nated and interrelated, whereby they may be seen 
to unite fundamentally in one ultimate character- 
istic, — man's reconciliation with himself and with 
his world, on the whole his glad and gladdening 
Epoch. 

But just look! now falls into our poet's Life- 
drama, not without some fitfully flashing fore- 
tokens, the deepest, dreadfullest counterstroke of 
human existence — his gladless, fate-shent time of 
Tragedy. 

Retrospect of the Period. But before we ad- 
vance to this coming culmination of the poet's 
Genius, which forms a wholly new Period of his 
biography, let us take a look backward at what he 
has passed through since we began observing his 
liondon Pan-drama. For we are now at the close 
of that busy and varied discipline of the poet 
which W8 have called his Apprenticeship, he being 
still the apprentice to his vocation and not yet the 
master in his full supremacy. About a dozen years 
it has lasted, with a marvelous poetic productivity 



442 SEAKESPE ABE'S LIFE-DBAMA 

of many kinds. Still it forms but one stage — the 
first — of Shakespeare's total achievement, and 
hence but one part of his biography. 

In the first place the reader will recall that this 
Apprenticeship has had its own distinct inner move- 
ment, with its three main divisions, which we have 
called its Epochs, designating each of them after 
its salient characteristic as follows : Collaboration, 
Imitation, Origination. Moreover these three stages 
are seen to form together a single process, which 
interrelates all three into one round of the poet's 
spiritual evolution. It is at this point that the 
vigilant reader will glimpse Shakespeare's indi- 
vidual Life-drama rising into and partaking of the 
movement of Universal Biography. 

In the second place, it is worth while to look back 
over what the man has now achieved, and to give 
some estimate of his place in World-Literature. 
Shakespeare has already made himself the greatest 
dramatist of England even during his Apprentice- 
ship; indeed it m.ay be affirmed that his preceding 
twenty-two dramas along with his other verse 
Ijedestal him as the supreme poet of the English- 
speaking folk wherever it be found. He outranks 
earlier Chaucer and later Milton, perhaps his two 
chief rivals for the first place in English Letters, 
with his present achievement. If we pass to dif- 
ferent tongues and peoples, Greek Aeschylus might 
equal him now, and possibly Spanish Calderon, not 
to mention other lofty competitors from abroad. 
That is, Shakespeare has already won the first place 



TEE MASTEE'S TRAGEDIES 443 

in English Literature but not yet in World-Litera- 
ture. 

Now this is the next step to which he pushes for- 
ward, for he is not yet the full peer of Homer, 
of Dante and (we would add) of Goethe. Behold 
him, then, rise and advance with new and mightier 
uplift, winning his sovereign place among the au- 
thors of the Race's Literary Bibles, as decreed him 
by the Tribunal of the Ages sitting in judgment 
over all human writ. Such is the grand transition 
which the poet is now to make in his experience 
and to express in his art, mounting up out of his 
First Period of ever-unfolding Apprenticeship to 
his Second Period of completed Mastery. 

At this point, however, it may be mentioned that 
the present book has fulfilled its chief purpose, 
which is to set forth as fully as possible the outer 
rise and inner evolution of Shakespeare till his 
present culmination. For just this portion of the 
poet's biography seems, as we would unfold it, to 
have been hitherto in part misconceived and in part 
neglected. Two more Periods of his Life-drama 
are to follow, but they are to be treated much more 
briefly. 



SECOND PERIOD. 

The Master's Traoedies. 

We have now come to the greatest achievement 
of the greatest Shakespeare, accordmg to the con- 
sensus of the best judges during the three centuries 
since his passing. Still loftier often runs the de- 
cision: these nine Shakespearian tragedies of his 
Second Period, taken together as a whole, are to be 
crowned the sovereign writ of the World's Litera- 
ture. Accordingly Shakespeare, now the supreme 
hero of the Word, seems to be rising to a place 
alongside or even above the supreme heroes of the 
Deed — Caesar, Charlemagne, Napoleon — in Univer- 
sal History. At an}^ rate he may well be deemed 
the master of the Anglo-Saxon Word, which to-day 
promises to make him master of the World's Word. 

Here, however, we may foresay that it is not at 
present our purpose to try to adjudge the literary 
value of these Shakespearian .tragedies, but rather 
to trace and to bring to the light their biographic 
purport, which lies more or less hidden under their 
extensive stage wardrobe. The circumstances of 
(444) 



THE MASTEB'S TRAGEDIES 445 

his time as well as his spiritual impress are crea- 
tively inwrought into all his works, which we are 
to unravel, selecting therefrom his distinctive 
lineaments, and weaving them together into the 
fabric of his Life-drama, 

Unto this purpose we must again, when we read 
him, lie in wait for Protean Shakespeare, so that 
we may catch him talking about himself in what 
he makes his characters say. A personal strain of 
the poet has often been detected in their make-up, 
as we have already indicated. We may well hear 
his own individual experience, when he rises into 
his furiously demonic vein, portraying jealousy in 
Othello, ingratitude in Lear, misanthropy in Ti- 
m.on, and hurling his mighty vocables as Zeus does 
the Olympian thunderbolts. His highest expres- 
sion always is instinct with self-expression. 

So it comes that Shakespeare when his truly 
genetic spell is on, verily obsesses his characters 
and makes them utter his deepest passion, his larg- 
est experience, his most intimate selfhood. Still 
we have to see under, or rather live with him under, 
that dramatic mask of his, which is the native garb 
01 his very soul. Hence the great tragic personages 
of this Period, vividly individualized as they are, 
we have ultimately to vision as the poet 's own self- 
incarnations. Thus he is to be conceived now writ- 
ing his innermost autobiography. But first let us 
put together the main external facts of this time. 

I. Nine dramas are to be placed in this Tragic 
Period — nine and no more, all of them Tragedies, 



446 SHAKESPEABE'S LIFE-DBAMA. 

not a History not a Comedy among them, though 
both history and comedy have their undercurrents 
through them. The next fact about them is that 
these nine are to be grasped, interrelated, and 
finally organized as one great work — nine acts, so 
to speak, of one comprehensive world-tragedy, the 
mightiest ever yet conceived and wrought to utter- 
ance in human speech. This unity we shall try to 
fetch to the fore in our exposition, representing as 
it does the sovereign phase of Shakespeare's total 
Life-drama, as well as his highest creative deed. 

Another fact to be emphasized is that this unique 
spell of the poet's creativity, his Tragic Period, ex- 
tends from the year 1600-1 till 1609-10, as near 
as these two dates marking its beginning and end, 
can now be made out. Thus the nine Tragedies 
run through nine years, which gives an average of 
one a year for their composition, though of course 
no such regular annual quota is provable. And it 
is evident that some of these dramas required for 
their full elaboration a much longer time than 
others. 

Observed also should be the point that the poet 
during this acme of his authorship was in his 
middle age, being about thirty-six years old when 
the Period opened, and forty-five when it closed. 
Thus he stood at his highest physically and men- 
tally, and did his supreme work mid that very 
flowering of human existence, as our days ordi- 
narily run, when the man's maturity is still inter- 
grown and upborne with youth's fresh energy. So 



TEE MASTEB'S TRAGEDIES 447 

his greatest Self became tragic. Such was the 
English poet's ominous prologue to the coming 
Seventeenth Century, which was destined to be 
England's most turbulent Century since her Wars 
of the Roses, with whose multitudinous Tragedies 
Shakespeare preluded his dramatic career. Thus 
in a way he now goes back to his earliest beginning, 
yet with a vast difference in worth and word. 

The retrospective reader is here inclined to ex- 
claim : What a brain-stunning change to an intense 
concentration out of a soul-scattering diversity 
of labors ! In the previous First Period we found 
Shakespeare writing every sort of Drama, History, 
Comedy, and also Tragedy — likewise every sort of 
Poetry, Epic, Lyric, as well as Dramatic : thus we 
went straying and browsing about through his 
lavish abundance, and became at first confused 
amid the poet's somewhat distracting versatility. 
So the question rises: What is the psychical 
source of such a mighty condensation of the Shake- 
spearian soul-world to the point of its hottest tragic 
ignition and volcanic eruption? For, that is what 
now takes place, with seeming suddenness, though 
in reality it has already given scattered prophetic 
gleams of its coming outbreak for several years. 
Such is, indeed, the poet's subtlest and darkest 
psychological problem, with which we have to 
wrestle during the present Period, and which will 
recur repeatedly for fresh illumination. 

Another change, striking through its suddenness, 
may be here set down. It is the sharp turn from 



448 SHAKESPEABE'S LIFE-DEAMA. 

joy to sorrow in the creations of the poet, and hence 
in his own soul. We have just witnessed his Happy 
Sexennium, six prolific years of work reconciled, 
loveful, essentially featured as Comedy. From this 
prevailing mood, on the whole so self-centered and 
contented, we mark him whirl and take a plunge 
into the last depths of Tragedy. Again darts up 
the dark enigma of Shakespeare's profoundest 
spiritual transition — his turn from a comic har- 
monious world-view to his deeply tragic night-side 
of human life. But to-day our whole earth-ball 
ought to appreciate this fleet change from sunshine 
to all-menacing obscuration better than ever before 
in its history. 

II. Before going farther, it is well to give some 
account of these nine Tragedies, which now consti- 
tute our single theme, as they are related to our 
poet's biography. Their names follow one an- 
other in this order: (1) Julius Caesar, (2) Ham- 
let, (3) Macbeth), (4) Timon of Athens, (5) King 
Lear, (6) Othello, (7) Antony and Cleopatra, (8) 
Coriolanus, (9) Troilus and Cressida. Such is our 
consecutive tally of the all-overtopping nine, along 
with their first easy linear arrangement. 

The next problem is to find out whether this 
simple line does not break up and form cognate 
groups of plays. Chronologically it is now agreed 
by the best critics that the first two, Julius Caesar 
and Hamlet, are quite cotemporaneous, and are kin- 
dred in thought, style, characters, and especially 
in their tragic thrust or prime impulsion. To these 



THE MASTEE'S TB AGE DIES 449 

we add Macbeth for like reasons. So we have con- 
structed our first group of three Tragedies, whose 
final completion lies in the years between 1600-1 
and 1603-4, thus embracing about three years. All 
of them have their own marked individual differ- 
ences, but at the same time bear a strong family 
likeness to one another in several common traits. 
Now to our mind the most distinctive and decisive 
of these common traits is that each of the three has 
its start from a supernatural urge or impact ; that 
is, the primal tragic thrust in each drama drives 
from an Overworld of spirit or spirits in some form. 
Thus they all may be said to have in general the 
same original forthright push into being. Hence 
we shall designate this First Group, or chrono- 
logically this First Epoch of three years, the other- 
worldly Group of Shakespeare's middle-aged Trag- 
edies (very distinct from his earlier ones), naming 
them after their deepest germinal characteristic. 
So it comes that Julius Caesar with its over-ruling 
Spirit of Caesar, Hamlet with its pre-existent 
Ghost, and Macbeth, with its prophetic Weird Sis- 
ters, constitute a unique class by themselves, since 
these supernatural instruments are not employed 
again by the poet in his present Tragic Period. 

The next best defined Group, in chronology as 
well as in outer and inner character, is generally 
accepted to be the two Roman plays, Antony and 
Cleopatra and Coriolanus. To these we shall con- 
join Troilus and Cressida, about which, however, 
there is no little question as to date, dramatic 



450 SHAKESPEABE'S LIFE-DBAMA. 

species, and authorship. Thus we have a Group of 
three Tragedies belonging to antique Greco-Roman 
History, and sprung as to theme of the old classic 
Mediterranean civilisation. Such is their united 
far-off historic derivation which classifies them to- 
gether according to their common original source. 
Hence we shall name this Group the old-worldly 
(or the past-worldly) Group of Shakespeare's nine 
supreme Tragedies, whose Epoch lies in the three 
years between 1606-7 and 1609. This last date 
(1609) we take as the conclusion of the entire 
Tragic Period, being the year in which the final 
drama (Troilus and Cressida) of the whole series 
was definitely printed and given to the public. 

We have now accounted for and put into order 
six of the nine Tragedies under purview, arranging 
these six into two distinct Groups, the first and the 
third. There remain three dramas, Thnon, King 
Lear, and Othello, which on the whole show them- 
selves the most refractory to any pervading prin- 
ciple of classification. Still, on close inspection, we 
may find them to have something in common which 
will bind their separated natures together into 
unity, forming them into the second or middle 
Group (or Epoch) of the present Period. In the 
first place all three have no outer supernatural im- 
pact for starting the dramatic action, as has the 
First Group ; on the contrary their primal tragic 
thrust comes from within the man, from his imme- 
diate self, as emotion, passion, thought. In the 
second place these same three dramas are not pro- 



THE MASTEE'S TBAGEDIES 451 

jeeted into a great historic Past of the world's 
civilisation, as is the Third Group above consid- 
ered; rather do they stress the immediate present 
in their occurrences and characters, though their 
story or fable be located in the far aforetime more 
or less dim. These three middle Tragedies, accord- 
ingly, can be classed into one Group, the second, 
which may be labeled the present-worldly Group, 
thus showing another phase of the same determin- 
ing principle which underlies the other two Groups. 
Such is, as we conceive it, the internal organic 
order of these nine Tragedies, being interrelated 
according to their essential factor, not tumbled to- 
gether after some merely external mark. We may 
recapitulate these Groups and their designations in 
one brief survey as follows: 

(1) The other-worldly Group, determined su- 
pernaturally. 

(2) The present-worldly Group, determined by 
man's own nature. 

(3) The past -worldly Group, determined his- 
torically. 

Of course this order is to receive its final con- 
firmation in the special treatment of the plays, 
which must here be deferred. Meantime let the all- 
testing reader keep in mind the above result for his 
further scrutiny. 

III. Having thus given a general organic out- 
line of the poet's achievement during this Middle 
Period, of his biography, we may next inquire about 
the external events of his practical life, which must 



452 SHAKESPE ABE'S LIFE-DBAMA. 

also have had an influence upon his literary work, 
and have helped furnish its content. On the whole 
the best way to get a structural survey over these 
nine years of his outer activities, is to divide them 
according to the localities where they take place: 
Stratford and London. Now several biographers 
have observed that Shakespeare during this Tragic 
Period seemed to hover between his country-home 
and his city- work; and it is most natural to sup- 
pose that he would spend his vacation in rural 
quiet, then during the busy season he would be 
found immersed in his theatrical duties. Accord- 
ingly we may here assume, for the matter has no 
rigid documentary proof, that the poet, being now 
a wealthy man, found it greatly to his comfort as 
well as of advantage to his literary labors, that he 
make his yearly retreat to the calm of Stratford 
after the strenuosity of London. And that was 
and still is the general custom of the English land- 
owning gentry, among whom Shakespeare was now 
enrolled. 

We have already observed in the previous Epoch 
that he had become a well-conditioned successful 
man in his poetic work, in his stage-art, and in his 
finances. Seemingly as soon as he was fulh' able, 
he returned to Stratford, his ever-loved birth-town, 
and still the home of his mother and father, of his 
wife and children, of his relatives and friends. 
We may recall that in 1597, he purchased the 
prominent Stratford residence known under the 
name of New Place, as a kind of palatial center foi' 



TBE MASTEE'S TRAGEDIES 453 

his family and people, whereupon he also obtained 
from the herald's office a title of gentility. In 
these acts we can see that he was taking np and 
embodying in himself the transmitted customs and 
institutions of his native land; he was realizing 
himself as a complete institutional man after the 
English model. Undoubtedly in such a bent one 
has to recognize an ingrained aristocratic element, 
which the world must accept in Shakespeare as 
personally temperamental and as also deeply na- 
tional ; indeed what would England herself be and 
her history without her aristocracy? Therefore 
Shakespeare at Stratford during this time was the 
conformist, the traditionalist, building up his inner 
life as well as his environment in harmony with 
his people's age-hallowed prescription. Very dif- 
ferent had been his defiant youth in the company 
of Marlowe and his imprescriptible fellow-poets. 

But behold, when he turns back to roaring Lon- 
don from his placid country-side — what a metamor- 
phosis within and without! He seems to revert 
with new and mightier intensity to his Marlowese 
Titanism. For just look into those Tragedies which 
he is composing and putting on his stage ; the 
deepest, bloodiest soul-riving conflicts of the strong 
man in and with his institutional world the poet 
dares here to give and to live — quite the reversal of 
that tranquil life at Stratford so concordant with 
the established social order. Verily it is another 
world or rather the other side of the same world; 
also another man is this Shakespeare now, or better, 



454 SHAKESPE ABE'S LIFE-DBAMA. 

the other side of the same man, whose deepest 
doubleness it is our present duty to fathom and to 
synthesize. Somehow thus for a start we may con- 
ceive the Stratford Shakespeare and the London 
Shakespeare. 

First of all we would gladly catch some glimpse 
of his private dwelling-place, and even of his work- 
shop in the city. Let the fact be put in its full 
contrast : from his lordly spacious mansion of New 
Place with its aristocratic pretension he shrinks 
back or perchance slinks back for his abode into a 
little room of a very modest lodging-house. He 
becomes a tenant of the humble tradesman, Chris- 
topher Mount joy, public hair-dresser and maker of 
wigs, needful especially for theatrical people. 
This most interesting and telling fact, for it reveals 
much about Shakespeare's way of living as well as 
of his private occupations, has been recently dug 
up from that cemetery of long buried lawsuits and 
other ancient troubles known as the Public Record 
Office of London. Almost as surprising is this 
other circumstance that the excavator was an Amer- 
ican Professor from far-away Nebraska University, 
Charles William Wallace, who reports examining 
several millions of old manuscripts, entombed 
there for some three hundred years, from whicli 
mountains of moldy written chaff he has sifted out 
these fresh golden grains of knowledge for the new 
Shakespearian biography. 

This house of Mount joy's stood "at the corner 
of Silver Street and Mugwell or Muggle Street in 



TRE MASTER'S TRAGEDIES 455 

Cripplegate ward" — Rabelais himself could not 
surpass this assortment of grotesque but genuine 
names. Moreover we are told that it was ''an an- 
cient and most respectable neighborhood", where 
dwelt many of Shakespeare's fellow-players and 
playwrights, mostly moneyless as usual, and evi- 
dently lodging like him in hired rooms, which are 
generally tenanted by the floating population of a 
great city. Thus did the wide-branching landed 
Stratford aristocrat shrivel and minimize himself 
into plebeian rookery quarters when he touched 
liondon. But why? Evidently he, disesteemed as 
an actor and probably also decried as an upstart, 
could not obtain social recognition in the capital 
from the nation's high-born class of titled nobility. 
Then a more compelling reason would be, that he 
needed quiet, solitude, self-communion in order to 
express himself fully in the great works which he 
was meditating and writing at this Period. 

Moreover during his stay with the Mountjoys, 
which must have been prolonged, it is of dated rec- 
ord that in 1609 William Shakespeare played a 
peculiar quite dramatic role in a real love-affair 
which involved the wig-maker's family. He was 
solicited by Madam Mountjoy to act as a go-be- 
tween or marriage-broker for the purpose of bring- 
ing into wedlock the household's daughter and 
a promising apprentice in her father's shop. The 
chief lure for the match seems to have been the 
young lady 's dower of fifty pounds. This very real 
part our Shakespeare performed with complete 



456 SHAKESPE ABE'S LIFE-DBAMA 

success, evidently making happy both the lovers 
and the parents. But the course of true love never 
did run smooth in actual life or in a Shakespearian 
comedy. After a time trouble arose over the dower, 
the husband complaining that he had the girl but 
not the stipulated money. The result was a law- 
suit in the year 1612, whose proceedings are still 
preserved in the Court's record, which gives the 
evidence of Shakespeare as witness in the case 
thus suddenly resurrected by Professor Wallace 
from long dead oblivion to new shining immortal- 
ity. But has not the circumstance a right comic 
tinge? Here the poet is discovered acting in life 
a part which recalls some of his dramatic charac- 
ters, for instance Dame Quickly and Pandar; and 
he seems to have been chief maker of a real comedy 
whose personages were the members of the family 
with which he was a lodger. Well may he and we 
with him exclaim : All the world 's a stage. 

Another co-incidence must be brought to mind: 
during this same time, Shakespeare was at the 
height of his Tragic Period whose central year may 
well be dated 1604-5, as it lies just in the middle 
between 1600 and 1609, the extreme years of this 
Period. One remembers that the Second Quarto 
of Hamlet was printed in 1604, probably with 
Shakespeare's own consent, or even with his per- 
sonal revision. Then it has long been observed 
that three of the poet 's greatest Tragedies have a 
tendency to hover about this same date (1604-5), 
namely — MacbetJi, King Lear, and Othello — as far 



TBE MASTEB'S' TBAGEDIES 457 

as the chronological proof of their origin can at 
present be made out. Shakespeare was then forty 
years old, at the middle-aged acme of his mightiest 
creative energy, which he nursed to its supreme 
expression when working alone jjerchance in his 
modest room over the wig-shop. 

The length of the poet 's stay with the Mount joys 
cannot be djrectly obtained from the documents, 
but it is inferred from his written testimony that 
his acquaintance with the family may have reached 
back to 1598. At any rate it is fairly presumable 
that he roomed in their house during the entire 
nine years of his Tragic Period, and completed on 
that humble spot all his great Tragedies, just the 
sovereign literature of all the world, as many 
good judges are saying at present. Fitting place 
it would seem to be for the worthiest memorial to 
the poet's heroic world-deed, these nine Tragedies, 
done in a little room of wig-maker Mount joy's 
house in Cripplegate ward, at the corner of Silver 
Street and Mugwell or Muggle Street, London, as 
the legend runs — the locality being only "a five 
minutes' walk from St. Paul's Cathedral", still 
the city's monumental cynosure. 

And let not the circumstance be forgotten, for 
it seems to be symbolic if not prophetic, that the 
most democratic fact in the life of William Shake- 
speare aristocrat, as he is often pronounced and 
denounced to-day, was dug up right in the heart of 
London, by a Professor from democratic America's 
most democratic Far West, who by some unique in- 



458 SHAKESPE ABE'S LIFE-DBAMA 

stinct traveled over thousands of miles to the very 
habitat where the supreme Anglo-Saxon poet lived 
his humblest yet his greatest days. Verily, why 
just the American, the far-comer, and not an 
Englishman born on or near the spot? (See Lon- 
doner Sir Sidney Lee's sardonic scowl of deprecia- 
tion (Life of Shakespeare, new ed. p. 27), and 
watch him tuck away into a brief foot-note every 
important discovery of Wallace. Still he is fair 
enough to tell where the full record may be found.) 

But the most revealing circumstance in the en- 
vironment of this Second Period is the poet's 
double domicile, dualizing him both as to his outer 
life and his inner soul into what may be called the 
Stratford gentleman and the London poet, or the 
reconciled (comic) Shakespeare and the world- 
defiant (tragic) Shakespeare. He after the intense 
strain of composing and staging his Tragedy had 
to flee from it to his peaceful rural home ; but with 
time's recuperation and domestic solace, he would 
feel the renewed urge, seemingly irresistible, to re- 
turn to the city where he again could give vent to 
the deepest present need of his spirit, namely his 
tragic self-expression. 

IV. This fact necessarily calls up the dark se- 
cret of Shakespeare's long and intense tragic crisis 
which we always come upon when we look more 
searchingly into the present Period. Whence came 
and what means this awful downpour of suffering 
for nine years — one Tragedy experienced and ex- 
pressed after another, blow upon blow, till the time 



TEE MASTER'S TM AGE DIES 459 

of his trial, or perchance expiation, was over ? The 
result, however, is before us : the Tragedy of Trag- 
edies set down in writ, one vast human Tragedy, 
that of Man himself, truly the tragic side or phase 
of Humanity, which the poet himself has passed 
through and told us of, in a kind of vicarious serv- 
ice for us as well as of tinal release and recovery 
for himself. We may here hint in advance that the 
poet survives his own tragic ordeal, and then enters 
upon a new and higher stage of his spirit's evolu- 
tion — the coming Third Period of his Life-drama. 

Shakespeare had already attained worldly suc- 
cess, he had won money, fame, influence, even rank 
— the externals of fortune were his by 1600. Thus 
his economic, utilitarian, purely personal motives 
for drama-making were fairly satisfied. He col- 
lected rents from his real estate ; he had a good in- 
come from his profession, being dramatic author, 
actor, manager and shareholder in his theatrical 
enterprises; he must also have gotten some returns 
from his literary property, since his early poems, 
especially Venus and Adonis, continued to sell edi- 
tion after edition. Recent estimates sum up Shake- 
speare's income at this time to have been a thousand 
pounds a year, which would be equivalent to some 
twenty or possibly twenty-five thousand dollars of 
our present American money, if we take into ac- 
count the diminished purchasing power of our 
metallic standard, since gold now buys hardly a 
fourth or a fifth of what it did in Shakespeare's 
day. 



460 SHAKESPEARE'S LIFE-DRAMA. 

Moreover the poet might have gone on producing 
his lighter plays, such as Twelfth Night and As 
You Like It, indefinitely unless something had 
stopped him. Such happy-ending and happy-mak- 
ing dramas vi^ere very popular and very remunera- 
tive, quite satisfactory as far as cash-box and repu- 
tation might be the poet's objects. But evidently a 
deeper necessity has taken hold of him, a mightier 
motive than anj^ external reward has clutched his 
creative power and insists upon compelling it to 
utterance. Though he already be famed as the sur- 
passing and most versatile poet of his time, having 
written some twenty-two dramas besides other kinds 
of poetry, he has not yet opened into the expression 
of his larger and deeper self ; indeed he has just 
reached down to this in his evolution, and feels the 
irresistible urge to hoist it out of its dark formless 
depths into the formful light-bearing word. 

And now we shall try to fathom some of the 
causes, if not the one ultimate all-coercive cause, 
which gave this tragic turn to the poet's Life- 
drama. On the whole it seems best to group these 
diversely compelling forces, working upon and in 
the man, under three heads which start from the 
first and outermost and then penetrate to the innei' 
most and ultimate. 

(1) What may be called Shakespeare's outer 
surrounding world, especially in its political aspect, 
was turning gloomy and threatening. All England 
looked forward with no small anxiety to the coming 
succession of the crown, as Elizabeth 's demise ap- 



THE MASTEB'S TBAGEDIES 461 

proached. James of Scotland, son of its truly 
tragic Queen, the executed Mary, was the rightful 
heir, but his character inspired deep solicitude and 
even opposition. Was there brewing another long 
dynastic strife like the Wars of the Roses, those 
wars which young Shakespeare had helped put into 
bloody dramas, which were still demanded by 
people as mirroring their possible coming conflict? 
Evidently the poet, now of middle life, must have 
tingled with the present new significance given to 
his earliest work. Then the Queen, Elizabeth, be- 
ing very old, morbid, lonely, getting more and 
more arbitrary like aged Lear, and even more cruel 
through an ever-growing suspicion of those nearest 
to her, became a sort of tragic Nemesis enacted be- 
fore the whole land. 

Against the Queen and her domination, some of 
the noblest spirits of the realm had not only pro- 
tested but were ready to resort to arms. Then 
came the rebellion in which Essex being taken 
prisoner, was beheaded, and Southampton, the 
poet's special admirer and patron, was thrown 
into the Tower, with death hanging over his head 
till King James set him free. How deeply must 
sympathetic Shakespeare have felt at that long 
spectacle of his noble friend's ever-menacing trag- 
edy! It was enough to tinge his soul with a like 
fate. Already we have noted that the poet, as he 
wrote the Lancastrian Trilogy, must have observed 
the germ of the growing insurrection in his high- 
born friends, and have signaled them a dramatic 



462 SHAKESPE ABE'S LIFE-DBAMA 

warning from his play of Henry V, who executes 
remorselessly three aristocratic rebels. And even 
the career and end of Hotspur may have contained 
an admonition for the dashing defiant high-born 
Southampton, 

It is probable, though not certain, that Shake- 
speare's theatre and even himself as actor became 
entangled in this rebellion by playing the deposition 
of Richard II in the streets of London during 
1600-1 at the request of Essex and his supporters, 
in order to stir up the people to revolt against the 
Queen. She is reported to have brooded with a 
deep suspicion and horror over the play as intimat- 
ing and perchance foreshowing her dethronement 
and death. In her excitement, doubtless, she once 
exclaimed that it had been acted forty times in 
open streets and houses for the Essex uprising, 
which, however, soon collapsed, being without any 
popular support. And Shakespeare's play of 
Richard II still shows the wound of this troubled 
time, since the early Quartos of it were slashed 
vengefully, being amputated of one hundred and 
sixty-four lines by the censor, who cut out the 
scene of the Monarch's deposition and submission. 

Moreover, it would seem that the Globe Theater 
new-built about this time (1599-1600) and the 
scene of Shakespeare's chief London investment, as 
well as of his special vocation and of his supreme 
poetic self-expression, was threatened for years 
with injury if not with destruction through hostile 
litigation. This Theatre started out with a stormy 



TSE MASTEE'S TBAGEDIES 463 

violent birth which, we may think, fated it from 
the start. Professor Wallace is of the opinion that 
these ever recurring business difficulties and hate- 
ful lawsuits have left their dark tinct upon Shake- 
speare 's Tragedies of this Period, causing ''the 
changed tone of the dramatic products ' ' of the poet, 
who now as the Globe's Theatre's own voice "re- 
corded the common tragic sense" lurking in all its 
actors and owners. The Professor also notes the 
great change in the mood of Shakespeare : ' ' prior to 
the Globe enterprise his plays had been on the sun- 
nier side" which seemed to close with Henry Y. 
(Wallace, Nebraska University Studies Vol. 13, p. 
32-3). So the poet's own new theatrical edifice em- 
bosomed within itself a kind of tragic destiny, be- 
ing a fated if not haunted house, whose very walls 
seem to have had for him a tragic inspiration. 

So we conceive that to Shakespeare there must 
have been a change from the London of the previ- 
ous Period, which on the whole was comic and 
reconciled in the mirror of his plays, especially 
those written during his Happy Sexennium. But 
now London itself becomes about 1600 transformed 
for him and also in itself, as it unrolls for a time 
the threatening scene of a great tragic catastrophe 
both national and personal. It is probable that 
from this fatefully overshadowed city he would flee 
annually to his sunny country-home at Stratford 
for relief and restoration. Still when he had 
caught fresh breath and creative urge in his sylvan 
retreat, he would again feel himself drawn back to 



464 SHAKESPEAEE'S LIFE-DBAMA. 

London for a new outpour of the ever-fecundating 
tragedy whicb yet lurked in his life and in his en- 
vironment, and demanded another corresponding 
utterance. 

(2) Such was the present doom-menacing out- 
look immediate]}^ before Shakespeare's eyes; but 
he was also led or driven back to a past fated 
world, that of Greco-Roman antiquity, which had 
left a noble account of itself in various forms. Now 
the form of that old Mediterranec<,n record which 
appealed most deeply and creatively to the poet 
during this Period he found in Plutarch's Parallel 
Lives of the famous Greeks and Romans, as set 
forth in North's English translation of Amyot's 
French translation from the original tongue. It 
is not too much to say that Plutarch became for 
Shakespeare in his present tragic mood the Book 
of Books, which he pored over and assimilated dur- 
ing the whole nine years. One may conceive it to 
have been almost his soul 's own breviary which he 
daily perused and pondered, and from which he 
won not only cultural knowledge but also a mighty 
productive impulse driving him to recreate a num- 
ber of its tragic heroes in his own dramatic form 
and speech. So let us imagine Shakespeare read- 
ing, contemplating, and re-writing Plutarch in his 
little quiet den at the Mountjoy home, where he 
also kept his working library. 

The poet had already composed his English His- 
torical plays, the materials for which he in large 
part derived from Holinshed, toward whom his at- 



THE MASTER'S TRAGEDIES 465 

titude was chiefly that of an appropriator of events 
of history with their personages. But his relation 
to Plutarch grew to be very different, far more in- 
timate ; from the old Greek biographer he took not 
only the needed incidents, people, and words, but 
the spirit, the world-view, which he makes his own 
for the time being. It is probable that Shakespeare 
had already dipped into Plutarch back in his youth- 
ful comic Epoch, since he shows some Plutarchian 
traces in his Midsummer Night's Dr&ani and else- 
where. Still the modern poet was not ready for 
the ancient biographer till now, when their two 
souls came together and interfused in a kind of mu- 
tual enthral Iment and ecstasy. Both dwelt in a 
world of tragic heroes, whose destinies they por- 
trayed each after his own art-form. Shakespeare 
was in a Plutarchian mood, and Plutarch, we may 
add, was in Shakespearian mood. So they found 
each other, both being at their deepest turn trag- 
ically minded. 

Of the nine Tragedies three are taken directly 
from Plutarch, all belonging to Roman History, 
whose grand personalities fascinated, and for a time 
fated Shakespeare. In three others Plutarch's in- 
fluence and also his materials can be traced. We 
have already noted how deeply Shakespeare was in 
former years determined by the Italian Renascence, 
which sprang from the antique Greco-Roman cul- 
ture, and which he after his manner assimilated 
and reproduced in his numerous comic plays. But 
the Shakespeare now Romanizing in Tragedies 



466 SBAEESPEABE'S LIFE-DBAMA. 

shows a much profounder and more original and 
compelling genius than the Shakespeare once Ital- 
ianizing in Comedies. And the more narrow Shake- 
speare of the English Histories rises from his par- 
ticular nation to the universal Shakespeare of the 
World's History. Such is one line of his larger 
evolution into and through his present tragic 
Period. 

We are to recall that Plutarch lived in a time 
of decadence and looked back upon two tragic 
worlds, the Greek and the Roman, with their re- 
spective Great Men whom he compared and paral- 
leled, being mooded to pensive reminiscence as if 
such greatness had forever passed awaj". Hence 
Plutarch, sculpturing his long gallery of classic 
biographies toward the close of the first century 
A. D., shows the pervasive belief, like his great 
contemporary the historian Tacitus, that the Ro- 
man Empire, then embracing the civilized world, 
was in a state of decline deathward. Such was 
also Shakespeare's mood at this crisis — a mood 
which our own recent World-AVar brought home to 
many of us helplessly sympathetic with all its 
tragic intensity. 

Thus our poet for his more universal self-expres- 
sion turned back to a corresponding time with his 
own — so he felt — to the great past of the World's 
History. And he lived in that antique writ, which 
was most congenial with his spirit's condition, be- 
ing the work of Plutarch who from this outlook 
may be deemed a Greco-Roman Shakespeare pro- 



TRE MASTEB'S TRAGEDIES 467 

jecting his double line of herioe characters, who 
are wrestling desperately with their tragic destiny. 
Still, here let it be whispered ahead, that under- 
neath this deep Plutarchian vein we catch glimpses 
of a deeper strain of Shakespeare unfated and rec- 
onciled, which will yet rise to the surface and utter 
itself in a new dramatic fori 

(3) But far profounder, more desperate and 
soul-compelling than the two fore-mentioned causes 
for Shakespeare's present tragic turn, was the 
third cause, which must now be set down with due 
emphasis. There fell upon him about this time 
the subtlest, intensest, most heart-cleaving experi- 
ence of all his days, which tapped the last sources 
of his being and made them well up into his might- 
iest volcanic utterance. For there sweeps now 
through his life's scene the shadowy figure of a 
woman limned by himself in overcast but very sug- 
gestive outline as The Dark Lady. It was she 
who, irresistibly fascinating but utterly faithless, 
had the demonic power of upturning and pervert- 
ing the very ground-work of his existence. Thus 
he has a furious love-life, at least when he stays in 
London, which, though attuned with the most ex- 
quisite pain, rouses to its highest excellence his su- 
preme creative gift, and reveals what may well be 
called the deepest and most eternal experience of 
his entire career. 

At the heart of Shakespeare's productive per- 
sonality lay love ever active, with its double power 
as the original fountain of all his best, and of all 



468 SHAKESPEABE'S LIFE-DBAMA. 

his worst, of his maddest execrations as well as of 
his wildest ecstasies. Through Antony's mask we 
may hear the poet 's rapture : 

Now for the love of Love and her soft hours ! 
There's not a minute of our lives should stretch 
Without some pleasure now. 

Not only as lover but as the lover of Love does he 
touch his topmost bliss. On the other hand falls 
the harsh counterstroke in his confession: "Love 
is my sin", though it had been not only his joy, 
but his grand means of reconciliation in the preced- 
ing Epoch, his Happy Sexennium. Hearken now 
to his desperate estate (Sonnet 147) : 

My love is as a fever, longing still 
For that which longer nurseth the disease : 
Feeding on that which doth preserve the ill, 
Th' uncertain-sickly appetite to please. 

He even proclaims his own mortal undoing : ' ' De- 
sire is death", so consumingly tragic blazes up his 
passion. Then his despairful outlook: 

Past cure I am, now reason is past care — 
And frantic-mad with evermore unrest ; 
My thoughts and my discourse as madmen's are 
At random from the truth vainly expressed. 
For I have sworn thee fair and thought thee 

bright. 
Who are as black as hell, and dark as night. 

Such is his darkest picture of his Dark Lady, who 
keeps lulling him with her vampire love while sap- 



TEE MASTEB'S TBAGEDIES 469 

ping his very sanity and crazing his speech to that 
of a madman. 

Very significant seems to us the poet's confession 
here that his love-fever brings upon him wild 
paroxysms of madness, which vents itself in irra- 
tional discourse. One has to think of Shakespeare's 
line of mad or mad-seeming folks who range 
through a number of his Tragedies, beginning with 
Hamlet and Ophelia and culminating in Lear, with 
crazy streaks in Timon, Lady Macbeth, and per- 
chance in others. But the main point now is to 
note that only in the poet's Tragedies of the pres- 
ent Period does he show such a strong unique bent 
toward the portraiture of the internally broken 
mind. Hitherto in the First Period with its genial 
diversity of Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies, 
there is not a distinctive madman, though he has 
clowns and fools even to superfluity. But the 
deeper turn of his pen to an incurred spiritual dis- 
order now rises to the front for the first time in his 
Life-drama. In fact a kind of predilection, or at 
least some mighty need of his own soul's deliver- 
ance drives him to anatomize and to dramatize the 
deranged Psyche of man and woman. Why such 
a seeming idiosyncrasy of creation in our greatest 
poet? Again we record our belief that the neces- 
sity lay co-ercively within his own heart's experi- 
ence to invoke his shattered spirit's ultimate rem- 
edy, namely self-expression in his art. Such was 
his way to ''cleanse the stuffed bosom of that peril- 
ous stuff which weighs upon the heart ' ', projecting 



470 SEAKESPE ABE'S LIFE-DEAMA. 

his deepest psychic alienation out of himself into 
writ and thus getting rid of it, at least for a respite. 
If we dare take him on his word, he knew how to 
save himself from insanity through the healing 
power of his own literary utterance. So we may 
prophesy that he will at the grand goal overcome 
this most insidious yet enraptured of life's illu- 
sions — the sensuous lure of the Dark Lady, more 
commonly painted as the Scarlet Woman. 

Here, then, would seem to be the central, genetic 
source of Shakespeare's deepest-fermenting change 
from his previous happy reconciled nature to his 
present tragic all-dooming temper. One thinks that 
he often alludes to this change of himself in what 
may be taken as the opening play of this Tragic 
Period — Hamlet. The Queen-mother wonders at 
''our too-much changed son", and the King asks 
anxiously: "How is it that the clouds still hang 
on you?" And Hamlet directly declares: ''I 
have that within which passeth show", that which 
cannot be given in any outward seeming like an 
acted part or a drama. Moreover, he throughout 
the play appears to be tampering with the problems 
of insanity, having become much interested in it 
and testing it with varied experiments on himself. 
So the whole Court is set agog by the odd unwonted 
doings of the young Prince. 

Moreover Hamlet himself in the most exalted 
prose passage of the drama describes his change, 
outer and inner, from his previous Happy Sex- 
ennium: ''I have of late — but wherefore I know 



TBE MAS TEE'S T BAGS DIES 47I 

not — lost all my mirth, forgone all custom of exer- 
cises", a very personal touch which hints him 
brooding gloomily in his room. "Indeed it goes so 
heavily with my disposition that this goodly frame, 
the earth, seems to me a sterile premonitory. 
. . . . What a piece of work is man ! . , . . 
And yet to me what is this quintessence of diist? 
Man delights not me; no, nor woman neither" — 
which latter note indicates his deepest difference 
from his former time of felicity. The love of 
woman, once the fountain of his sweetest creation, 
has turned to the bitterest curse. Almost at the 
start of the play we hear him exclaim this curse to 
himself : ' ' Frailty, thy name is woman ! ' ' And 
then soon after he, the misanthrope, literally 
crushes the heart and also the brain of his lady- 
love, Ophelia, with his sledge-hammer words : ' ' Get 
thee to a nunnery ; why wouldst thou be a breeder 
of sinners?" The race deserves suicide, and he 
does not except himself : "it were better my mother 
had not borne me. ' ' With this sentence we catch a 
glimpse into the last depths of the poet's tragic 
wretchedness : he appears estranged not only from 
himself as individual and from his institutional 
world, but also from Man as born of Woman, from 
the Genus Homo itself whose reproduction should 
be halted at once on the planet. To such an all- 
devouring monster has ruined love overmade him 
from his once joyous productive energy, in which 
we beheld him not very long since luxuriating with 
so much productive ecstasy during his Happy Sex- 



472 SHAKESPE ABE'S LIFE-DBAMA 

ennium. Here we touch the first cause, the orig- 
inal germ of the poet's most intimate psychical 
transformation: he, the mightiest lover of Love as 
the very home of his creative heart, has fallen out 
with Love itself, converting it into the World's 
tragic Pandemonium. 

Y. This brings us to emphasize the most strik- 
ing, indeed the altogether stunning change in these 
nine dramas: it is Shakespeare's totally altered 
view of the female personality and its function in 
the universal order, when compared to what he has 
exalted it to be in his previous plays. Just put 
side by side the two opposite sets of women: first 
take Portia, Rosalind, Helena, and their like of the 
Comedies ; then Goneril, Lady Macbeth, Cressida 
and their like of the Tragedies. What an awful 
abysmal contrast! Verily the Shakespearian 
woman has changed from the loving begetter and 
rescuer of love, to its subtle or ferocious destroyer ; 
she now seems ready to tear to pieces her institu- 
tion, the Family, showing herself totally unable 
and unwilling to heal its conflicts, which remedial 
power was her special gift, as once glorified by the 
poet. Often she turns to the insidious Fury undo- 
ing her very essence as mother, wife, sweetheart ; or 
even when innocent, like Desdemona, she is shown 
the unconcious instrument of her own tragic fate, 
which also entangles others with her death. 

This altered attitude of the poet in his treatment 
of woman is the supreme surprise which staggers 
the reader of these Tragedies when he takes them 



THE MASTER'S TRAGEDIES 473 

up in their biographic succession. He necessarily 
interrogates their oracle: What desperate life-en- 
venoming experience underlies such a complete spir- 
itual reversal of the poet's whole nature? It is not 
simply a stoppage, or a renunciation; Shakespeare 
is still the intense lover, yea the lover of woman's 
love, but this love of hers is for him and for his 
genius no longer positive and constructive, but neg- 
ative and destructive. Still he clings to it, and 
mightily wrestles with it, and portrays it as the 
inner dominant energy of this Second Period of his 
writ and of his life 's evolution. 

Thus the Shakespearian woman, losing that love- 
born, reconciling, mediatorial power of hers be- 
comes tragic, carrying along with her into her hap- 
less lot the man, whom she not only fails to inspire 
and redeem, but lures and taints with her own 
spirit 's poison. Again we have to think of the Dark 
Lady in this connection thralling to her Satanic 
fascination the love-shent poet, who well recognizes 
the deadly charm, but cannot shake it off. In 
more than one Sonnet we may hear him rattle his 
chains madly but in vain; take for instance No. 
150: 

Oh from what power hast thou this powerful 

might. 
With insufficiency my heart to sway? 
To make me give the lie to my true sight, 
And swear that brightness does not grace the 

day? 



474 SHAKESPEARE'S LIFE-DBAMA. 

Whence hast thou this becoming of all things ill, 
That in the very refuse of thy deeds 
There is such strength and warrantise of skill 
That in my mind thy worst all best exceeds? 
Who taught thee how to make me love thee more, 
The more I hear and see just cause of hate? 

With such piercing interrogations he seeks to pene- 
trate this new mystery of his love-life, which is 
pulverizing his very soul in the crash of its con- 
tradictory emotions. 

It should be remembered that Shakespeare had 
up to his present period seen three great historic 
Queens as dominant figures in the near nations of 
Western Europe. The sovereignty of woman he 
had witnessed in fuller reality than it has ever been 
manifested before or since. How Elizabeth affected 
him at this time has been already indicated. Cath- 
erine de Medicis (died in 1589) had shown herself 
a kind of Fury in the contemporary religious wars 
of France, having taken her part in the massacre of 
St. Bartholomew which occurred during the boy- 
hood of the poet. Then the career of passion-fated 
Mary, Queen of Scots, with its tragic end in 1587 
must have impressed his imagination profoundly, 
as it has stimulated poetic natures to its dramatic 
re-creation till to-day. All these cotemporary 
strong-willed Queens, three of them, had in them a 
demonic strain of feminine charm which must have 
gripped Shakespeare the more intensely through his 
personal experience with a similar woman, who 



TRE MASTER'S TRAGEDIES 475 

also tyrannized wantonly over his helpless love, as 
he has repeatedly bewailed in his Sonnets. 

Woman, then, sovereign woman, is the man- 
scourging lost soul in these Tragedies. She be- 
comes the original temptress who lures her Adam 
to his new transgression, which again means expul- 
sion of both from happy innocent Paradise. Still 
it is but right to let the reader peep through the 
rifted storm-clouds toward the goal of this tragic 
Inferno, which opens doubtfully with Hamlet's 
mother Gertrude of Denmark, yet gives us fresh 
hope at its close in Volumnia of Rome, mother of 
Coriolanus. And more significantly Shakespeare 
starts his tragic despair by sending Ophelia to a 
nunnery, but after some eight or ten years he 
takes the nun out of cloistered life and graces her 
for marriage in the person of Isabella. 

VI. The First Folio lists these nine plays under 
the head of Tragedies, which arrangement, as we 
conceive, derives from Shakespeare himself. Still 
three important changes have been found neces- 
sary. Titus Andronicus and also Romeo and Juliet 
stand in the Folio's list, but from the biographic 
viewpoint these two dramas are to be set down as 
youthful efforts and hence should be placed early 
in his First Period. Cymheline is ranged among 
the Tragedies by the Folio; but the play, in spite 
of certain tragic elements, is essentially a drama of 
redemptive mediation, and so should be assigned to 
the Third Period. Troilus and Cressida causes the 
hardest puzzle as to its position. The Folio omits 



476 SEAKESPE ABE'S LIFE-DBAMA 

it altogether from the Table of Contents, or the pre- 
fixed "Catalogue" of plays, but prints it among 
the Tragedies and designates it specially as a 
Tragedy. 

So we keep bringing up and holding before us 
the mighty Nine of Shakespeare and of all Litera- 
ture. We have to think that the dramatist, while 
writing them, was as tragic as any of his charac- 
ters, or as the whole of them together. Not only 
Hamlet but Shakespeare himself was meditating 
suicide when he wrote the famous soliloquy, which 
indeed is the culmination of a preceding line of 
man-destroying thoughts like "Get thee to a nun- 
nery" ! There is a sonnet (No. 66) which seems in- 
serted in his poetical diary as the personal counter- 
part of Hamlet's "to be or not to be", though the 
heartache of it is even stronger and fuller than 
that of the pensive soliloquy: 

Tired with all these, for restful death I cry — 
As, to behold desert a beggar born, 
And needy nothing trimm'd in jollity, 
And purest faith unhappily foresworn, 
And gilded honor shamefully misplaced, 
And maiden virtue rudely strumpeted. 
And riglit perfection wrongfull}' disgraced, 
And strength by limping sway disabled, 
And art made tongue-tied by authority, 
And folly doctor-like controlling skill, 
And simple truth miscalled simplicity, 
And captive good attending captain ill. — 



TEE MASTEE'S TRAGEDIES 4.^^ 

Eleven reasons he here sums up for quitting this 
tragic earth-ball, and yet he stays for one all-over- 
powering reason — love — which he cannot "leave 
alone" behind him, as it were deserted: 

Tired with all these, from these I would 

be gone. 
Save that, to die, I leave my love alone. 

Seemingly Shakespeare had felt, at least in his 
present mood, these "whips and scorns of time" as 
specially directed at himself. Did he not in his 
own case "behold desert a beggar born", and like- 
wise his "art made tongue-tied by authority" in 
the recent royal interference with his Richard II, 
"and folly doctor-like controlling skill" through 
the censorship? And so we may well hear in Ham- 
let's soliloquy a parallel and perhaps cotempora- 
neous lament glooming over 

The oppressor's wrong, the proud man's con- 
tumely, 
The insolence oj' office, and the spurns 
That patient merit of the unworthy takes. 

And let the keen-sighted reader fail not to remark 
that such complaints scarcely befit a prince of the 
blood like Hamlet, whose station would not nat- 
urally bring him into rasping contact with "the 
insolence of office" and such like troubles. Now 
Shakespeare the actor must in his vocation have 
endured all these ills of authority, but hardlj^ the 
king's son Hamlet. Thus the sonnet and the drama 



478 SEAKESPE ABE'S LIFE-DBAMA. 

Strike the one fundamental key-note thrilled out 
of the life-experience of the poet. 

From these instances along with many others, we 
are to win the ultimate conclusion: Shakespeare 
at his best uses his dramatic mask for his own 
deepest self-expression. If we are in right tune 
with his heart-strings, we may overhear him pre- 
luding something of the kind in one of his sonnets 
(No. 74) : 

My life hath in this line some interest. 
Which for memorial still with thee shall stay; 
When thou reviewest this, thou dost review 
The very part was consecrate to thee ; 
The earth can have but earth, which is his due — 
My spirit is thine, the better part of me; 
So then thou hast but lost the dregs of life, 
The prey of worms, my body being dead — . 

Whoever or whatever this deeply shaded thou may 
be — the point is much disputed and can be turned 
to several meanings — one thing is here clearly em- 
phasized: "this line" of mine is my memorial, 
consecrate, eternal, revealing "my spirit, the better 
part of me", namely my immortal portion, beyond 
the death-dealing blow of Tragedy. So through 
his "line" he liberates himself from fate, even 
when his body has become ' ' the prey of worms ' '. 

Thus Shakespeare, we may repeat, has found 
the open secret of his life's supreme freedom 
through self-expression, through the grand discip- 
line of writing his Tragedies, which writ affords 



TBE MASTEB'S TRAGEDIES 479 

him not only the day's immediate relief but the 
spirit 's final reconciliation and redemption. He has 
discovered that through his pen-point runs an ulti- 
mate inner self-evolution, and hence he has to write 
in order to unfold out of his present deeply negative 
condition. So this pan-tragic world of his, builded 
of his Nine Tragedies, which he has to pass through 
and to transcend in rocking throes of passion, is a 
kind of purgatorial discipline, being at bottom rem- 
edial for his lacerated, indeed demonized soul. His 
act of self -liberation is his writing, his weapon 
against his world-gloom and perchance suicide is 
his pen, which thus in his hands is not only 
mightier than the sword, but than death. 



THIRD PERIOD. 
The Tragi-Comedies — Expiation. 

Into a new dramatic form as well as into a new 
stage of his self-expression Shakespeare now ad- 
vances, having passed out of his death-dealing time, 
and triumphed over the Titanic negativity of his 
Tragedies. It is a basic turn in his life's total 
psychology, and constitutes the third grand act of 
his completed Pan-drama, as it has been played out- 
wardly and inwardly through his whole career. 
Hence we caption it his Third Period, in line with 
his two preceding Periods which it rounds out to a 
finished achievement. Here may be again repeated 
that if the student aims to grasp the entire Shake- 
speare, he is definitely to outline and spiritually to 
appropriate these the poet's psychical Periods. 
For they are the ordered means of visioning the full 
sweep of his realized personality, and thus of be- 
coming acquainted with the whole man both in his 
external and internal fulfilment. 

Moreover, with some protest at the word, we have 
named this Period tragi-comic, inasmuch as it still 
has the note and the conflict of Tragedy, but of 
(480) 



TBAGI-COMEDIES 481 

Tragedy overcome, reconciled, indeed expiated. 
That is, the poet is no longer in his drama man-de- 
stroying, but man-rescuing ; his new bent is to save 
even the tragic individual from fate, not to whelm 
him into its jaws. Hence we employ the blended 
vocable Tragi-comedy, very serious of meaning, 
even if usage has tainted it with a certain grotesque 
tinge. 

I. Under this rubric we set down four dramas 
of Shakespeare, which, as their separate dates are 
Hot ascertainable, may be arranged in the following 
line of succession : Measure for Measure, Cymbe- 
line, Winter's Tale, and Tempest. All these plays 
have a similar ground-tone of religiosity, if not of 
formal religion; they show a common structural 
principle of flight and return; they are quite ho- 
mogeneous linguistically and metrically ; their per- 
vasive spirit is mediatorial, that of atonement and 
restoration after lapse, wrong, sin. 

Thus the whole may be said to form a Tetralogy 
of Redemption, a kind of Passion Play of Suffering 
and Salvation, which saves the otherwise doomed, 
which unfates the hitherto fated, which in its very 
course and process makes Tragedy untragic. And 
here should be noted the counterstroke : in undoing 
this elemental tragic obsession of his, the poet him- 
self at his mightiest poetic overflow is undone ; he 
becomes becalmed in his genius, being toned down 
into moderation, repentance, reconciliation. The 
gigantic Shakespeare of the Second Period seems 
now hamstrung, no longer world-overwhelming in 



482 SEAEESPEABE'S LIFB-DBAMA 

his grandiose energy, but repressive of himself and 
penitential of his own greatness. 

So he now confines himself to four dramas which 
make this Period altogether the least copiously 
creative of his three Periods. Still he probably felt 
even with such a small output, that he had suffi- 
ciently expressed himself in this phase of his dra- 
matic soul-life. He was young enough to have 
written much more, but he preferred to stop, hav- 
ing rounded the last arc of his creative cycle. Some 
three or possibly four years from 1609 till 1612, he 
was employed in finishing this portion of his work : 
a brief time compared to either of his former Pe- 
riods. In striking contrast with his early exuber- 
ance and poetic self-indulgence, he will shorten the 
duration of his penance. For we are always to 
remember that Shakespeare writes only from his 
own deepest experience, whose present record is 
set down in these Tragi-comedies, being his confes- 
sion and expiation through his writ. Hence they 
are redemptive not merely of his dramatic charac- 
ters, but of himself; if he was damned to the bot- 
tom of the pit through jealousy in his Othello, he 
redeemed himself from its hell through his Winter's 
Tale, and Cymbeline. 

Not one of these four plays is to be found in the 
form of a Quarto published during the poet's life- 
time ; they were all first printed, as far as our pres- 
ent knowledge reaches, in the Folio of 1623, seven 
years after his death. Thus was rescued for our 
behoof one entire Period of,, Shakespeare's Life- 



TBAGI-COMEDIES 483 

drama. Whence the editors, Heminge and Condell, 
obtained these dramas, will probably remain a se- 
cret. It should be noted, however, that the Folio, 
does not classify them except under the general 
head of Comedies, of which The Tempest is placed 
first, and The Winter's Tale last, while Cymheline 
is set down in the list of Tragedies. Hence rises 
the question : was the poet himself aware of this 
significant change in his work and in himself? Of 
course only the plays themselves can furnish the 
evidence, which they do with emphasis, revealing 
in their action a right portion of his autobiography, 
even if veiled under his art's native mask. 

Two other dramas are often assigned to this 
Third Period, Pericles and Henry VIII. But their 
authenticity is much questioned, and it cannot be 
discussed here whether they are to be in part or 
wholly excluded from the Shakespearian canon. 
Their titles, being proper names, seem not adjusted 
to the poet's usage in designating his Comedies. 
Moreover their structure, their inner movement and 
their general spirit appear quite different from 
those of the foregoing Tragi-comedies, though with 
the latter they have certain deep touches in com- 
mon. Being such doubtful members of the poet's 
Life-drama, they shall have to be put aside for an- 
other occasion. 

II. The next cardinal fact which we would en- 
force is that this Third Period is both externally 
and internally, on its surface and in its deepest, a 
Return to the First Period, especially to the latter 's 



484 SHAKESPEABE'S LIFE-DBAMA 

third or comic Epoch. Both are essentially sana- 
tive, mediatorial, restorative after some breach, 
and, with a few exceptions, both turn out happy- 
ending. Thus we behold the poet going back and 
interlinking himself with his beginning, rounding 
out his creative Self to its completed career, and 
therein making it a manifestation or exemplar of 
what is universal in individual biography, as well 
as in the total Cosmos. 

To be sure there is a decided difference between 
these two Periods in regard to the meaning and 
the depth of this reconciling or mediating process. 
The first set of Comedies show the way out of 
foible, folly, mistake ; but these Tragi-comedies por- 
tray the remedial journey out of transgression, 
guilt, even out of death. Both are indeed libera- 
tions of the unfree entangled spirit ; both rescue 
the enmeshed individual, whereby both bear the 
same name in Shakespeare's own terminology — 
Comedies. 

In this connection it is to be noted that the poet 
goes back to the Mediterranean South for his dra- 
matic story and setting; he returns to the Italian 
Renascence for materials, and even for characters 
in part. Thus he again Italianizes, though with a 
far deeper spiritual import as well as in more 
sombre colors. The dark religious Teutonic side of 
the Renascence seems now to have taken hold of 
him, in contrast with the former sunny, worldly 
tone of his Italianizing Comedies, which we have 
elsewhere evaluated. Contrast for instance the 



TBAGICOMEDIES 4S5 

bright Italianism of Twelfth Night against the aus- 
tere night-shade of The Winter's Tale with its 
transfer of scene to the North. Yet both are Come- 
dies in Shakespeare's nomenclature. 

There is no doubt that during this Period the 
poet retires more and more to his quiet, contem- 
plative home-life in the country at Stratford, away 
from the turmoil of London. Rural scenery with 
its sedative mood gives special tone to three of these 
plays ; in fact the flight from civilized struggle to 
the simple sylvan life is^in itself sanative, and be- 
comes the grand means for the soul 's restoration to 
harmony after its deadly discords with itself and 
with the outer illusive circumstance. So we may 
conceive Shakespeare during the present Period 
more and more deeply returning to the calm and 
the balm of Stratford out of his furious tragic ex- 
perience in London. But therewith the earth-heav- 
ing upburst of the volcanic Shakespeare simmers 
down toward quiescence, having become reconciled 
and pacified with himself and with the world's 
order. 

Thus we seek to emphasize the deeper purport of 
this Return which is both spatial and spiritual, re- 
vealing the poet both outwardly and inwardly, 
manifesting itself in his work, in his life's events, 
and most profoundly in the movement of his very 
soul. Moreover it brings to light what we may call 
the Biographic Norm, which underlies and really 
generates all individual Biography, elevating it out 
of an orderless succession of personal happenings 



486 Sn ARE SPE ABE'S LIFE-DBAMA. 

to a science stamped with the principle of univer- 
sality. For at last we have to ask: What has 
Shakespeare's life in common with all complete 
lives? Every human being is a Self which he has 
to evolve through the years and to realize in accord 
with its own special endowment. Now if we can 
find that law of the Self and express the innermost 
process of its development, we have won the unit of 
every possible Biography, the actual Psyche of the 
Standard Man. Hence it comes that here so much 
stress is given to this Return of Shakespeare upon 
himself, not only as the completion of his individual 
life, but as his realisation and expression of all 
mankind's life. 

III. We have just emphasized the fact that this 
Third Period of Shakespeare's Life-drama is a Re- 
turn out of a discordant tragic condition to a time 
of reconcilement and restoration. Now we are to 
note that each of these four Tragi-comedies has 
such a movement both in its outer organism and in 
its inner soul : an estrangement and flight from the 
existent social order to some kind of ideal mediat- 
ing w^orld, which heals the unhappy fugitive and 
sends him back harmonized to his former life and 
its institutional environment. Thus we behold, 
stating the matter in abstract terms. Flight, Me- 
diation, and Return — a completed round of ulti- 
mate individual experience. Here we may catch 
the present spiritual stage of the poet himself, 
which he creatively projects into his dramatic art- 
form — Tragi-comedy — which now becomes his true 



TBAGI-C0MEDIE8 487 

self-expression, and whose thought and structure 
he repeats four times, with varying external accom- 
paniments. 

It is worth the more zealous worker's while to 
compare these four Tragi-comedies and their ideal 
world of mediation with four Comedies of the First 
Period which also has an ideal world of mediation. 
Measure for Measure with its celibate life of re- 
ligion has its parallel in Love's Labor's Lost with 
its celibate life of study; the Christian cloister is 
the ideal refuge of the one, the heathen Academe 
of the other. The Two Gentlemen of Verona and 
As You Like It show a flight to a primitive sylvan 
life as remedial of wrong, which sylvan life we find 
repeated, undoubtedly with important variations, 
in the two Tragi-comedies, Cymheline and Winter's 
Tale, whose restorative is their undefiled primitive 
world. Finally The Tempest introduces the media- 
torial power of supernatural beings (Ariel and his 
spirits) while Midsummer Night's Dream employs 
a similar ultra-human element (Puck and the 
Fairies). Thus we have the right to say that 
Shakespeare, consciously or unconsciously, goes 
back to his earlier form of Comedies, and re-writes 
them in his deeper-toned, though darker, less spon- 
taneous vein. Moreover we are to reflect that he 
here reveals himself in one of his favorite art- 
forms ; he must have felt some innate personal sym- 
pathy with this dramatic movement of the flight 
of the stricken soul to some form of the ideal world, 
which has the power of healing and restoring to 



488 SHAKESPEARE'S LIFE-DBAMA. 

harmony the man estranged without and within. 

Thus we have found the poet reaching back and 
taking up again one of his more youthful art-forms, 
and pouring into it a fresh, even if somberer con- 
tent, that of his last maturest experience of life. 
Once more we note him returning upon his former 
self, and therein rounding out his total Life-drama 
to its final completeness. In no less than eight 
plays, from first to last, do we come upon this 
unique cycle of Flight from the corrupt reality to 
some kind of Ideal World which through its reme- 
dial balm brings about inner Restoration and outer 
Return. And a similar process he has repeatedly 
hinted in his Sonnets, for instance (No. 60) he 
meditates : ' ' Nativity crawls to maturity ' ' with its 
crown of works — let us call this his First Period, 
which, however, gets overcast with ''crooked 
eclipses" which "against his glory fight", wherein 
we may take with him a glance at his Second or 
Tragic Period. And still further in the same Son- 
net the process he elaborates : 

Time doth transfix the flourish set on youth, 
And delves the parallels in beauty's brow; 
Feeds on the rarities of Nature 's truth 
And nothing stands but for his scythe to mow; 
And yet to times in hope my verse shall stand — . 

So we may conclude that old Time with his scythe, 
the destructive genius of Tragedy, cannot stop the 
development nor kill the work of William Shake- 
speare, nor blast his hope of immortality. Indeed 



TBAGI-COMEDIES 489 

there is a passage from one of his later Sonnets 
(146) which might be prefixed as the most expres- 
sive motto to this Third Period with its four Tragi- 
comedies, when we hear the poet make his fervid 
appeal to his own soul : 

Then, soul . , . 
Buy terms divine in selling hours of dross, 
Within be fed, without be rich no more ; 
So shalt thou feed on Death that feeds on men, 
And Death once dead there 's no more dying then. 

Such is this new soul of the poet, the tragi-comic 
we may call it, which undeaths Death, which slays 
that destroyer of men who was the bloody sovereign 
of the preceding period of Tragedy. And once 
more we may catch up from a Sonnet (107) a rem- 
iniscent afterglow of this reconciled time: 

The mortal moon hath her eclipse endured — 
And peace proclaims olives of endless age. 
Now, with the drops of this most balmy time 
My love looks fresh, and Death to me subscribes. 

Hence the reflection will spring up that this en- 
tire Life-drama of Shakespeare, as it has been 
hitherto set forth in its three Periods, is one great 
all-comprehending Tragi-comedy whose conclusion 
is the redemption of the tragic individual and the 
recovery of the social order from its threatened 
tragic conflict and possible submergence. So we 
may designate the poet's work taken in its whole- 
ness as redemptive, remedial, aye regenerative. 



490 SHAEESPE ABE'S LIFE-DBAMA 

And the full fruition of the study of his career is 
to be gotten not from merely one of his plays 
though it be his greatest, not even from one of his 
Periods, though it contains his grandest poetry and 
largest characterisation, but from the entire all- 
embracing round of his Life-drama in its innermost 
psychical evolution. Such is indeed the right bio- 
graphy of the man when it is worthily construed. 

Thus the complete work of Shakespeare reaches 
its supreme fulfilment as one of the Literary Bibles 
of mankind. This unified full-rounded Tragi-com- 
edy of his Life-drama is a new revelation of the 
Divine Order, though his earlier Comedies, with 
which he starts, belong rather to the Mundane Or- 
der. Hence springs the religiosity which pervades 
these four Tragi-comedies ; they are a kind of 
epiphany of the supernal government of the Uni- 
verse and of man's portion therein. And to the 
student of Universal Literature we may suggest at 
this point the parallelism of Shakespeare's total 
Life-drama with Dante's threefold world-poem, 
which its poet also calls a Comedy, but not a Divine 
Comedy, which title of it is not of his coinage. 

And now it is in place to make here the further 
reflection : all our poet 's Sonnets, from which we 
have just cited briefly, one hundred and fifty four 
of them taken together, constitute in their very 
heart or in their ultimate quintessential process an- 
other parallel Tragi-comedy, showing likewise the 
Breach, the Expiation and the Return in deep cor- 
respondence with the foregoing Pan-drama of the 



TBAGI-COMEDIES 491 

poet. For they form his poetic diary during a 
dozen years and more, mirroring very diversely in 
their little subjective facets all his three Periods, 
comic, tragic and tragi-comic. Shakespeare as 
Prospero, looking backwards sets down a round 
dozen years as the duration of his Ariel 's tragic 
torment when his spirit was wedged f atef ully " in a 
cloven pine ' ' : 

Within which rift 

Imprisoned thou didst painfully remain 

A dozen years . . . thy groans 

Did make wolves howl and penetrate the breasts 

Of ever-angry bears ... it was mine art . . . 

That made gape the pine and let thee out. 

So the poet in sublimely sympathetic speech meta- 
phors his spiritual process, and even tallies the 
number of its years. 

Undoubtedly there are in the Sonnets many di- 
verse moods bubbling up according to the bent of 
the moment when the record is set down. They run 
the entire gamut from petty folly to loftiest wis- 
dom, from lowest sensuality to highest spirituality, 
from Hell to Heaven, with a Protean transforma- 
tion of idea and image. Such is the nature of this 
truly Shakespearian diary. Still within its copious 
overflow of vagaries lurks a drama, just his own 
drama, verily a Tragi-comedy, mirroring himself 
in relation to that strangely elusive woman-soul 
shadowed forth by him as the Dark Lady. 

IV. Here we are brought to grapple with an- 



492 SHAKESPE ABE'S LIFE-DBAMA 

other very significant change which stamps the 
deepest constitutive mark upon this Third Period: 
it is the poet's entirely new attitude toward the 
female character. From his destructive tragic view 
of the woman-soul as just set forth, he turns to 
make it more profoundly constructive and reme- 
dial than ever before, even than in his happiest 
love-work of the First Period. Let the reader stop 
and ponder well this startling transformation of 
Shakespeare's Life-drama. The woman (say Her- 
mione) now takes her place as the central figure of 
the whole Tragi-comedy, becoming the ultimate 
mediatorial instrument of repentance, atonement 
and regeneration, in fine the right bearer of the 
poet's new reconciled world-order. 

Very different, in fact just opposite was his 
treatment of her in his Tragedies, as we may recol- 
lect. There she was Vampire, Fury, Destroyer; 
sensual, faithless to love and to truth, the arch dis- 
sembler; verily the representative of the woman- 
soul lost, again the betrayer of Paradise to the Ser- 
pent. What a terrible procession of hag-hearted 
Eumenides of the feminine type sweep through the 
poet 's Second Period ! And what could have been 
the cause of his change and redemption from such 
race-hating misogyny? 

But without waiting for a reply which may come 
later, let us now herald the good news that the poet 
has made another nodal transition, and his last, 
having evolved out of his tragic destructive time 
into his tragi-comie reconstructive creation, which 



TBAGI-COMEDIES 493 

restores to his female folk their reconciling media- 
torial character, but with new and far deeper at- 
tributes. Again this may be deemed another phase 
of the poet's return to his earlier work and to his 
primal self, yet with a vast fresh experience of life 
and writ, which spurs his genius once more to its 
basic self-expression. 

For the purpose of illustrating, and enforcing 
these cardinal distinctions, here seems the fit place 
to bring before the mind of the reader some spe- 
cially selected examples taken from the plays them- 
selves. Accordingly we shall pick out three sets of 
typical female characters belonging to the des- 
ignated Periods. And it appears to add a kind of 
towardly numerical harmony if we give to each of 
these three sets three representative Shakespearian 
women, thus : 

(1) Portia, Rosalind, Helena — who belong to 
the First Period, and reveal their unique power in 
overcoming the obstacles to their marriage with the 
man they love- — Comedies. 

(2) Gertrude, Goneril, Cressida — who belong to 
the Second Period, and show themselves violators 
and disrupters of their institution, the Family, 
thus representing the negative woman-soul in the 
social order — Tragedies. 

(3) Isabella, Imogen, Hermione — who belong 
to the Third Period and manifest their distinctive 
reconciling character by healing the broken do- 
mestic tie, by redeeming and restoring the fallen 
husband and the fallen institution — Tragi-comedies. 



494 SHAEESFEABE'S LIFE-DEAMA 

It is evident that this third set are seeking to 
overcome and to heal the tragic conflict and disrup- 
tion produced by the second set. Thus they are in 
the deepest sense mediators of the estranged spirit, 
reconcilers, redeemers. To such a lofty position, 
Madonnaward, the poet now elevates the woman- 
soul in his latest dramas, which may be taken not 
only as his final literary testament to the future, 
but also as the ultimate supreme stage of his own 
life's evolution. And there can be little doubt that 
these three sets of female characters reveal a more 
personal and inly movement of the poet's self-ex- 
pression than his male characters. His deepest ex- 
perience always springs out of the feminine half of 
humanity and of himself; hence his basic theme is 
love in its three cardinal forms — love immediate, 
love estranged, and love restored — which also sig- 
nalize distinctively the three Periods of his Life- 
drama. 

Again we have to ask if this new life and writ of 
repentance and reconciliation had anything to do 
with his own direct experience. Did Shakespeare 
himself pass through some such purgatorial ordeal 
with its contrition and reparation? We know that 
during this Period he had more fully than ever re- 
turned to home and family at Stratford, where he 
lived again with wife and children, with mother, 
kindred, and friends (his father had already de- 
ceased in 1601). Evidently the grand separation 
and estrangement of his career had been repented 
of and atoned; the transgressor had expiated and 



TBAGI-COMEDIES 495 

made good his former lapse, restoring himself to 
his institutional life from its start in his birth- 
town. Noteworthy is the fact that the wronged but 
forgiving and reconciling wife plays such a prom- 
inent part in these Tragi-comedies, and never be- 
fore. Then too we observe now for the first time 
the poet's loving and detailed portraiture of the 
devoted young maiden, as if he had the model at 
his own hearth in his young daughter Judith, who 
in 1600 was fifteen years old. 

So we repeat our view that Shakespeare in these 
Tragi-comedies was composing a chapter of his own 
biography. Moreover what he wrote was his heart 's 
very confession given at the altar of his soul, 
whence he received from his own conscience his 
priestly absolution. Perhaps above all men who 
have wielded the pen he made his writ the means of 
his spiritual recovery, although he also won with 
the same pen money, fame, even immortality. If, 
as we hold, the Tragic Muse is ultimately his angel 
of rescue from the Furies of his own negative na- 
ture, and saves him through her gift of utterance 
from the real tragedy of his Genius, we have to 
think that these Tragi-comedies tell openly in his 
dramatic art-form the way of his restoration and 
redemption. 

The love of woman, accordingly, has come back 
to him, but transfigured and endowed with a fresh 
restorative power, renovating his productive en- 
ergy, and indeed connecting him ultimately with 
creation itself. The genetic instinct of his Genius 



496 SHAKESPE ABE'S LIFE-DBAMA. 

again drives him to deliver a new message to man- 
kind from the Creator. Moreover this new message 
makes all his works one completed work, having 
finished so to speak, the colossal statue of his total 
Life-drama, whereby his personal self becomes an 
image or rather a realisation of the universally 
creative Self, and our human consciousness is seen 
to be a revelation of God-consciousness, a veritable 
Theophany. And we may repeat that from this 
view-point all individual biography shows itself as 
an exemplar and indeed offspring of Universal 
Biography. 

Still there remains for us the harder, subtler, 
obscurer question: What brought about this life- 
fulfilling change in the poet? Can we catch even 
remotely and perchance but fieetingly, some glimpse 
of its source? 

V. It is evident that throughout these Tragi- 
comedies he has gotten rid of that insidious Dark 
Lady who so long cajoled him, and goaded him, 
through her Satanic magic of infatuation, to his 
tragic outlook on woman, man, and the world. To 
be sure we .may still trace in him memories of the 
former awful scourge, since no experience of his 
ever gets lost, though it be shown not obliterated 
but transcended. So that burning curse, branded 
on his brain and seared through his heart to the 
very bottom, that curse whose all-annihilating up- 
burst we may hear worded strongest in King Lear, 
has become not only mitigated but transformed 
into the sweet and tender voice of forgiveness and 



TBAGI-COMEDIES 497 

reconciliation. Furious London no longer sub- 
merges forbearing Stratford in its tragic maelstrom, 
but actually the mild rural townlet is made to pla- 
cate and change into her own peace-breathing na- 
ture the struggle-torn metropolis. The Dark Lady 
has in some way been unqueened of her long sov- 
ereignty over the poet. Personally the greatest 
conquest of his life doubtless, but bringing the 
counterstroke that, along with his placated soul, his 
Genius also becomes pacified, moderated, relieved 
of the world-quaking paroxysms of its fight with its 
own tragic damnation. 

Hence we must be ready to find a considerable 
let-down of the cosmic energy which breaks forth 
into such mighty utterance throughout his Trage- 
dies, and which caps them as Time's greatest liter- 
ature. Still we are not to think that this present 
increased placidity of self-expression is due to dis- 
ease or even to exhaustion, as some critics have 
maintained; rather is it a sign of restoration and 
of a deeper health, though certainly less smiting in 
word-power and passion. Surely The Tempest, 
probably his last play, reveals him still the inex- 
hausted if not the inexhaustible Shakespeare at the 
top of his creation; but mark its very suggestive 
transition from the storm and wreck of the first 
scene to the pervasive sunshine of the rest of the 
play with its penitence and forgiveness sealed by 
the happy -making festivities of love and marriage. 

There are many signs in the Sonnets that this 
separation from the Dark Lady took place not 



498 SHAKESPEABE'S LIFE-DBAMA. 

merely once, but repeatedly; mimerous were the 
fallings-out and the makings-up, for both the man 
and the woman seem to have given equal provoca- 
tion and then shown equal penitence for pecadillos, 
"We hear in an early stage (No. 36) the poet's sad 
declaration: ''Let me confess that we two must 
be twain", but he soon takes it back. Later (No. 
87) he cries out in a deep fit of despondency: 
"Farewell! thou art too dear for my possessing", 
still he keeps her a while longer, and she keeps him. 
But at last we may catch what appears his final 
resolve with its consolation (No. 119) : 

benefit of ill ! now I find true 

That better is by evil still made better, 

And ruined love, when it is built anew 

Grows fairer than at first, more strong, far 

greater. 
So I return rebuked to my content. 
And gain by ill thrice more than I have spent. 

A scrutinizing look into the last four lines of this 
same Sonnet will show the poet taking a rapid 
glance backwards through his three Periods. That 
"ruined love" (evidently tragic) he is going now 
to rebuild so that it will be "fairer, stronger, far 
greater" (surely in these Tragi-comedies) than it 
was "at first" (namely in the early Comedies). In 
fact he employs the very word by which we have 
alread expressed the present rounding out of his 
Life-drama ; that is, he will ' ' return ' ' to his ' ' con- 
tent", (say, to his Happy Sexennium). 



TBAGI-COMEDIES 499 

There is one of these Sonnets (No. 81) very 
plaintive and deep-toned, which may be taken as 
his final sad retrospect, when has been brought to 
a close his much perturbed but enormously stimu- 
lating intercourse with the Dark Lady. We are 
to listen to him summoning before his imagination 
the eternal worth of all his writings (probably both 
dramas and sonnets) which she has inspired him to 
compose. The whole Sonnet is suffused with the 
melancholy of a last farewell : 

Or I shall live your epitaph to make, 
Or you survive when I in earth am rotten; 
From hence your memory Death cannot take, 
Although in me each part will be forgotten. 
Your name from hence immortal life shall have, 
Though I, once gone, to all the world must die ; 
, The earth can yield me but a common grave, 
When you entombed in men 's eyes shall lie ; 
Your monument shall be my gentle verse, 
Which eyes not yet created shall o'er read. 
And tongues to be your being shall rehearse, 
When all the breathers of this world are dead; 
You still shall live — such virture hath my pen — 
Where breath most breathes — e'en in the mouths 
of men. 

Such seems to be the poet's backlook at his life's 
deepest most creative passion, when he surveys the 
amount and the quality of his verse which the Dark 
Lady has called forth from his Muse. One cannot 
help drawing certain inferences from the above in- 



500 SHAKESPE ABE'S LIFE-DBAMA 

timately self -revealing lines. (1) Shakespeare ex- 
pects here that his writings will be published, so 
that people yet unborn will read them ; hence these 
Sonnets are not simply for his private friends, as 
is sometimes stated, but for the world, for all fu- 
turity. (2) He is absolutely convinced of the last- 
ing worth of his poetry — a conviction which he has 
repeatedly expressed elsewhere with equal empha- 
sis. (3) A reading public for his works, "which 
eyes not yet created shall o'er read", he summons 
with confidence before his mind, showing that he 
was well aware of his chief future constituency. 
(4) In strong contrast, with the immortality of his 
writ, he stresses the evanescence of his individual 
life : "I, once gone, to all the world must die ' '. 
This contrast is often found in Shakespeare ; some- 
thing of the kind we may hear in Hamlet's defiant 
words : 

I do not set my life at a pin 's fee ; 

As for my soul, what can it do to that 

Being a thing immortal as itself 

(Namely the Ghost). 

The poet having passed through the last stage 
of separation from his Dark Lady now brings his 
sonneted diary to an end, inasmuch as the deepest 
compelling source of its poetic inspiration has van- 
ished from his experience. Accordingly in 1609, 
doubtless with his consent even if not with his di- 
rect co-operation, the complete book of his Sonnets 
is published. Probably he did not proof-read or 
correct or arrange in sequence his text. - 



TBAGI-COMEDIES 501 

VI. In recent years a new problem pertaining 
to the Sonnets and their author has forged to the 
fore: can the Dark Lady be directly pointed out, 
named, and to a certain extent biographied? Let 
the answer be at once set down and grappled with : 
Thomas Tyler of London University about the 
year 1890 published his book modestly called Shake- 
speare's Sonnets, which a number of enthusiastic 
students of the poet have heralded as the most orig- 
inal contribution to Shakespearian literature 
hitherto made by any Englishman. "Whether this 
be so or not, must here be left out of discussion ; 
but we shall at once state the result of Tyler's con- 
siderate and considerable search: The Dark Lady 
of the Sonnets is to be identified as Mistress Mary 
Fitton, maid of honor to Queen Elizabeth, which 
service she is declared to have entered about the 
year 1595, being then a young lady of seventeen, 
as her baptismal record dates her birth in 1578. 

Enough opportunities she had of seeing Shake- 
speare, who was the already famous dramatist of 
London, when his theatrical company played at 
court, and lent their art to other festivities. But 
especially about 1597, when Love's Labor's Lost was 
given in its supposed new form, her picture was 
painted very elaborately by the poet under the 
character of Rosaline, who is held to represent 
Mary Fitton in her dark eyes and features, (hence 
her title of the Dark Lady) as well as in her daring 
behavior and witty sallies. But the main point is 
that Shakespeare is now declared to have found the 



502 SHAEESPE ABE'S LIFE-DBAMA 

creative female ideal ever anew inspiring his Muse 
to produce that gallery of exquisitely loving and 
lovely women who shine all through his Happy 
Sexennium, whereof an account has already been 
given. 

So the poet's heart-life bubbled up joyously and 
creatively for several years, portraying mainly the 
woman as love's protagonist winning against all 
obstacles the man of her choice. Doubtless there 
were occasional cloudlets streaking the pair's fe- 
licity, for both with good reason could hardly help 
jealously suspecting : so we catch from many a little 
turn in the Sonnets. But now falls the awfulest 
backstroke possible upon the poet. He heard his 
fate's news, for all London had caught the ma- 
licious buzzing of the scandal which is thus forth- 
rightl}^ recorded by one of Elizabeth's highest of- 
ficials, evidently after due investigation: "Mis- 
tress Fitton is proved with child, and the Earl of 
Pembroke, being examined, confesseth a fact, but 
utterly renounceth all marriage." Such was the 
violent shock at Court, felt most distinctiy in what 
the reporter tells further : ' ' I fear they both will 
dwell in the Tower a while, for the Queen hath 
vowed to send them thither. ' ' Redder must have 
blazed Elizabeth's red hair at this defiance of her 
courtly etiquette as well as of her personal vanity. 
More shreds of that scandal have floated down into 
the present, but the prying reader can find them in 
other books, to his and our better satisfaction. 

Now if this quake tumbled up the Court to such 



TBAGI-COMEDIES 503 

turmoil, what an outbursting volcano must it have 
caused to shoot forth from the breast and mouth of 
William Shakespeare, her lover and her poet with 
a worldful of emotion in his heart and of imagina- 
tion in his brain ! His was the greatest soul of all 
the land harboring the mightiest self-expression; 
what new word, especially about the female char- 
acter, will he now have to say? This torturing in- 
fernal experience must also have its right record; 
still he is totally unable to expel from his bosom 
that love of the woman of whose utter falsity he 
has become well aware. Out of such a lacerated 
heart we may hear him sigh a Sonnet (No. 95) to 
his Dark Lady or perchance Mary Fitton: 

How sweet and lovely dost thou make the shame 
Which, like a canker in the fragrant rose, 
Doth spot the beauty of thy budding name ! 
0, in what sweets dost thou thy sins inclose ! 
That tongue that tells the story of thy days, 
Making lascivious comment on thy sport. 
Cannot dispraise but in a kind of praise ; 
Naming thy name blesses an ill report. 

Such is her malignant witchery over her broken- 
hearted lover, and well does she know^ her sov- 
ereignty, sporting with him as the cat with the 
caught mouse, who cannot escape, at least not yet. 
Still the poet will find his relief, yea his revenge, 
we may call it, through that all-rescuing gift of 
his, namely self-expression in poetry. He will cast 
out of his seething bosom into the off-bearing word 



504 SHAKESPEASE'S LIFE-DBAMA 

his heart's trituration, his tragic emotion, even 
Death itself. 

Here we are to note this telling synchronism : the 
foregoing deed of Mary Fitton in connection with 
the Earl of Pembroke took place in 1600-1, which 
coincides to the very year with the start of Shake- 
speare 's Tragic Period, as before set forth. His 
Hamlet must have been soon if not already on the 
way, introducing those two fatefuUy blasted women, 
the mother (Gertrude) and the lady-love (Ophe- 
lia), early representatives of that new sort of 
Shakespearian femininity whose dark destiny sings 
with many a throeful reverberation through all his 
Tragedies for some nine years. So with this tran- 
sitional deed and time he turns his life's most sig- 
nificant yet terrific node, from happy Portia and 
Rosa,lind to hapless Cressida and Goneril, from the 
woman-soul loveable and loved to the woman-soul 
faithless and fated, loveless and lost. 

Such was the central deepest transition of the 
poet both in his life and in his art, both really and 
ideally. He passes from joy-radiating Comedy to 
woe-thrilling Tragedy, still through the experience 
of love, which both saves and slays, and which thus 
reveals its twofold opposite nature both as pre- 
server and destroyer of man. A ruin he now re- 
gards his love of woman, indeed he calls it his 
"ruined love", which, however, his undying aspira- 
tion still hopes "to rebuild". And this brings us 
to the second supreme soul-renewing transforma- 
tion in the poet's Life-drama : Why and how could 



TBAGI-C0MEDIE8 505 

he pass out of this mortal tragic cataclysm to his 
immortal redemptive creativity? 

VII. Confession, repentance, atonement we 
have found to be the deepest and most enduring 
notes struck in these four Tragi-comedies, being 
emphasized as the turning-point to recovery and 
regeneration on the part of the guilty soul, the 
elsewise tragic transgressor. Undoubtedly Shake- 
speare has often used the penitential process before 
this time, even in his early plays, but never to the 
same extent, nor with the same soul-stricken and 
compelling power of conviction. And especially 
has he turned the Sonnets into a kind of confes- 
sional, through which fervently throb the throes of 
repentance. So much we have already enforced 
with some repetition. 

But now comes the perhaps surprising fact that 
the Dark Lady also has her spells of deep contri- 
tion and remorse for her manifold sins, all of which 
or at least many of which are right fully and 
frankly reported by her heart-shent but ever-for- 
giving lover still idealizing her in his Sonnets. At 
the conclusion of one of these (No. 34) he seems 
talking to her as if face to face : 

Though thou repent, yet have I still the loss; 
The offender's sorrow lends but weak relief 
To him that bears the strong offense's cross. 

Here we see the sorrowful Shakespeare hearken to 
the repentant Dark Lady's ''strong offense", which 
she confesses, and we also catch his woe-laden an- 



506 SHAEESPE ABE'S LIFE-DEAMA 

swer. Even her woman's tears are not wanting, 
which, however, soften still more his heart to for- 
giveness : 

Ah, but those tears are pearl, which thy love 

sheds 
And they are rich and ransom all ill deeds. 

We cannot help asking our discerning reader at 
this point whether Shakespeare could employ such 
tender condoning words to a man, as is commonly 
supposed, be he called Southampton, Pembroke, 
Hughes, or any other male-named malefactor dug 
up by the vast horde of commentators? 

Not a few are the similar deepfelt turns possible 
only to the man and woman in the ultimate inti- 
macies of a mutual love-life, which we may sense 
in the Sonnets, for just such a record is their 
ehiefest human worth in themselves as well as in 
the poet's biography. Another little echo of the 
same sort we may hear in the next Sonnet (No. 35) 

No more be grieved at that which thou hast done : 
Roses have thorns, and silver fountains mud; 
Clouds and eclipses stain both moon and sun 
And loathsome canker lives in sweetest bud. 

So the poet seeks to allay the fair culprit's peni- 
tential sorrows for her trespasses, which she seems 
to be telling him as her real confessor, from whom 
she knows she will receive easy absolution. It is 
possible that the famous lines (No. 107) already 
cited 



TBAGI-COMEDIES 507 

The mortal moon hath her eclipse endured . . . 
And peace proclaims olives of endless age 

pertains to both Shakespeare as well as his Dark 
Lady, and celebrate their final peaceful recovery- 
after their long happy and hapless discipline of 
love. 

Again the question rises: Can the Dark Lady 
in her present mood be identified with aforesaid 
Mary Fitton ? Has the latter too reached the stage 
of final repentance and resolved to quit her gay life 
in London, returning to her country home, as 
Shakespeare returns fully to his Stratford about 
the same time? She is drawing dangerously near 
to thirty years old ; time and fast living have begun 
to stamp their tell-tale creases and their jaundiced 
colors upon her looks, which she tries to paint 
away, to the poet's disgust, as we may infer from 
some of the Sonnets. She has certainly had her 
youth 's frolic, and sown a very prolific crop of wild 
oats, having given birth, among her various other 
fertilities, to three infants all born outside of wed- 
lock, but none of them ascribed to Shakespeare. 
Mr. Tyler, our special reporter on these delicate 
matters, informs us that about 1607-8, she definitely 
marries a Mr. Polwhele, though she is doubtfully 
credited with two other husbands at different times 
in her career, but not one of them named William 
Shakespeare, With this last husband, however, she 
retires from London to her native rural Gaws- 
worth where she long lives fameless, yet repentant 



508 SEAKESP:E ABE'S LIFE-DBAMA. 

and reconciled, we hope, surviving many years her 
world-renowned poetizer, whom, in addition to his 
other greatnesses, she has made the most enduring 
and colossal lover that ever poured out his heart 
into human speech. 

And now this loftiest culmination of his love- 
life is what he is going to celebrate in his native 
art-form, producing what some sympathetic critics 
have deemed his grandest drama, Antony and Cleo- 
patra. There is little doubt that he has brooded 
over this theme many a season, at least ever since 
he, absorbing old Plutarch for material, wrote his 
Julius Caesar, at the beginning of his Tragic Pe- 
riod. For then he had already come to feel the ir- 
resistible but mortal fascination of his own dark 
Cleopatra, whose world-overmastering Antony ho 
might well conceive himself to be in his poetically 
heroic deed. Let the synchronism again be marked 
that the completion of this drama is dated 1607-8, 
the time when Mary Fitton, through her marriage 
and retirement is supposed to have passed forever 
outside of Shakespeare's personal horizon. 

Readers of the poet have often detected the Dark 
Lady of the Sonnets acting herself out in word and 
deed under the mask of the Queen of Egypt, who 
is also "black with Phoebus' amorous kisses". But 
what we would now enforce is that Cleopatra in 
her last utterances shows herself a repentant 
woman, whose sighful voice we may hear in 

My desolation does begin to make 
A better life (Act. V. Sc. 2). 



TBAGI-COMEDIES 509 

So she breathes her change in deep self-communion. 
And in the same scene she openly confesses to 
Caesar 

I do confess I have 

Been laden with like frailties which before 

Have often shamed our sex. 

Nor should we omit another touch which seems to 
recall Mary Fitton the mother, even if her chil- 
dren, like Cleopatra's came of irregular love: 

Peace, peace, 
Dost thou not see my baby at my breast 
That sucks the nurse asleep. 

It is her motherhood, then, which solaces the dying 
thought of Cleopatra, even when she puts the 
deadly asp to her bosom, breathing out her life 
in her last reconciled words as they gasp off slowly 
into eternal silence: 

As sweet as balm, as soft as air, as gentle — 

Thus Shakespeare seizes from antiquity and cele- 
brates what may be deemed the sovereign love-pair 
of Universal History, which has hardly furnished 
another like them in the course of the intervening 
centuries down till to-day. For here the love of 
man and woman towers far above a small com- 
munity's embroilment (like that of Romeo and 
Juliet), mounting up to a world-historical event on 
which future ages may be said to hinge for a time. 
In such a colossal framework the poet has dared to 



510 SHAKJESPE ABE'S LIFE-DSAMA. 

enshrine his passion for the Dark Lady, where it 
still may be felt in all its burning intensity as well 
as in its Titanic grandiosity. It is another in- 
stance among many that Shakespeare appreciated 
the lasting greatness of himself and of his work, 
even outstripping Roman Antony in significance 
for human History. 

So, if we may trust the double record, set down 
both in the Sonnets and in the Dramas, we have 
finally to behold Shakespeare and the Dark Lady, 
the man and woman, perchance another Adam and 
Eve, as two penitents atoning for their past lives 
with an internal and also external act of contrition 
and expiation, both of them fle'eing from their 
Babylon to an innocent idyllic, yet institutional 
life in the country. What a far-echoing report of 
themselves they have left behind, reverberant 
through space and down time, having together 
created the very masterpiece of the World 's Litera- 
ture, called Shakespeare's Tragedies! 

VIII. My reader, I hope, still feels prompted to 
propound along with myself one question more: 
Was it this Dark Lady (call her Mary Fitton if you 
wish) who started in Shakespeare's soul-life the 
foregoing penitential turn which we feel in every 
one of his Tragi-comedies ? Did her final trans- 
formation, or conversion it may be called, take hold 
of the poet too, over whom she held such magic 
sway of imparting herself good and bad, joyful 
and joyless, comic and tragic? Is she really the 
underlying influence which propels him into this 



TRAGICOMEDIES 511 

Third Period of his total Life-drama, performing 
essentially the same function she performs appar- 
ently in the two previous Periods ? No documented 
statement to that effect, no direct proof is to be 
found, still some hintful pointers scattered through 
several Sonnets we may stop and look at, seeking to 
feel if not to decipher their somewhat veiled sug- 
gestion. 

Already we have noticed the poet's absolute rec- 
ognition of the Dark Lady as the source of his in- 
spiration: for instance (No. 38) 

How can my Muse want subject to invent 
While thou dost breathe that pour'st into my 

verse 
Thine own sweet argument, too excellent 
For every vulgar paper to rehearse? 
O give thyself the thanks if aught in me 
Worthy perusal stand against thy sight, 
For who 's so dumb that cannot write to thee 
When thou thyself dost give invention light. 
Be thou the tenth Muse — ten times more in worth 
Than those old nine. . . . 

I am aware that the vast majority of commentators 
maintain that the above lines were addressed to 
some man. But there is nothing in the Sonnet from 
which any inference of the sort can be drawn. Im- 
possible! Such a view taints their poetic flavor 
and kills their meaning for the poet's life. And 
in the next Sonnet (No. 39) he stresses with an ex- 
clamation the source of his song : 



512 SHAKESPEARE'S LIFE-DBAMA. 

0, how thy worth with manners may I sing 
When thou art all the better part of me ! 

In fact he more than intimates that sometimes the 
sight of her is too powerful, the inspiration of her 
presence too overwhelming so that it paralyzes his 
pen (No. 103) : 

blame me not, if I no more can write ! 
Look in your glass, and there appears a face 
That overgoes my blunt invention quite 
Dulling my lines and doing me disgrace. 

And thus we find confessed in many a Sonnet the 
poet's utter infatuation with the Dark Lady. Let 
her be as devilish as she may, he cannot break loose 
from her charm as she clutches him fast by his very 
heart strings, revelling in her mastery, yea in her 
tyranny over him, and finding her demonic joy, as 
he more than once coniplains, in the love-tortures 
of her writhing yet helpless victim. 

But there is another side. That Dark Lady was 
herself a genius in her way; she had her tran- 
scendent gift, the gift for exciting inspiration, 
since, if we may credit the confessor himself, she 
possessed the genius to inspire the loftiest flights 
of the widest-winged poetic imagination that the 
world has yet seen. She was not beautiful ; indeed 
her own raptured idealizer stresses not only her 
homeliness but her faithlessness. Still hers was 
the ever-welling fountain of which Shakespeare 
needed to drink in order to rouse his creative 



TBAGI-COMEDIES 513 

energy to its uttermost excellence. Then another 
peculiar quality of hers we catch up from these 
Sonnets: her marvelous power of metamorphosis, 
spiritual and physical. She could be the lovely, 
lordly, faithful Portia, and then she became a fe- 
male Mephistopheles who made her lover Shake- 
speare's heart and mind tragic, and therewith hu- 
man nature itself. 

But now we return to the last metamorphosis of 
the Dark Lady, her repentance and soulful recov- 
ery, conjectural indeed, but certainly possible, yea, 
quite likely in her spirit's evolution, as we may 
note in the case of thousands of reformed trans- 
gressors. Did she then lead the love-leashed poet 
along with herself into her present final transform- 
ation? Was she again the pivot of this fresh turn 
of his spirit's renewal through the love of woman, 
which we have seen to be the ultimate motive power 
of his creativity throughout his entire career? 

In a number of Sonnets we find hints of some 
profound and lasting separation which tears the 
heart of the poet and drives him to a deep-toned 
melancholy of retrospection. Some such note is 
struck in No. 36: 

Let me confess that we two must be twain, 
Although our undivided loves are one ; 
So shall those blots that do with me remain, 
Without thy help, by me be borne alone. 

Evidently the time has come for a permanent and 
complete severance of the most intimate ties of the 



514 SHAEESPE ABE'S LIFE-DBAMA 

soul; henceforth they must live asunder, though 
their loves cannot be parted by any resolved, outer 
separation : 

In our two loves there is but one respect, 
Though in our lives a separable spite. 

Thus the poet must now go on alone, ** without thy 
help" — another indication of her place in his 
spirit 's activity. A further yet quite opposite stage 
in the parting of the two lovers seems suggested in 
No. 39 : 

Even for this (my song) let us divided live, 
And our dear love lose name of single one. 
That by this separation I may give 
That due to thee which thou deserv 'st alone. 

Here seems to be couched some hint of the new sort 
of poetry or drama which he is writing, and which 
she, the newly transformed Dark Lady, still in- 
spires, being ''that due to thee" from me "which 
thou deserv 'st alone". If this be the case, then 
the poet himself declares her the source of his last 
inspiration to write. So we dare construe these 
two Sonnets quite against all authority. Though 
we would avoid verbal interpretation, we may state 
that one misunderstood word (him) in the last 
line of this Sonnet (No. 39) has been a stumbling 
block : ' ' By praising him here who doth hence re- 
main. ' ' Him means in this connection not some in- 
dividual (Southampton, Pembroke, etc.), but, as 



TBAGI-C0MEDIE8 515 

the context shows, is general in its allusion signify- 
ing anyone, or whomever. 

And now comes a Sonnet composed in a still dif- 
ferent stage or mood of this last Period. It shows 
the poet criticising himself, intimating his falling- 
off in style and power from his previous excellence 
(No. 76) : 

Why is my verse so barren of new pride, 
So far from variation or quick change? 
Why with the time do I not glance aside, 
To new-found methods and to compounds 

strange ? 
Why write I still all one, ever the same, 
And keep invention in a noted weed 
That every word doth almost tell my name, 
Showing their birth and where they did proceed ? 
know, sweet love, I always write of you. 
And you and love are still my argument — 
So all my best is dressing old words new, 
Spending again what is already spent, 
For as the sun is daily new and old 
So is my love still telling what is told. 

There is no gainsaying the fact that the poet is 
here looking back at his work and giving his view of 
its present style and of himself. The central point 
which he emphasizes is that he reproduces his old 
art-form. Comedy, keeping his "invention in a 
noted weed". This means, as we construe it, that 
he has returned to his former comic "method" 



516 SHAKESPE ABE'S LIFE-DBAMA 

(his First Period) in these recent Tragi-comedies. 
Moreover he declares his theme to be eternally the 
same : ' ' sweet love, I always write of you ' ', where- 
upon follows that very suggestive acknowledgment : 
"yo^ and love are still my argument". That is, 
single-love he transmutes and idealizes now through 
his poetry to all-love ; his individual passion is chas- 
tened and purified to universal love (say in Her- 
mione). Hence "let our dear love lose name of 
single one" in this new transfiguration. Un- 
doubtedly he repeats himself; so does the Sun, be- 
ing ' ' daily new and old ' '. 

Thus Shakespeare indicates his return to his 
earlier plays, reconciled and happy-ending, out of 
his tragic time. This Sonnet was doubtless one of 
the poet's last, written possibly in 1609, not long 
before the publication of his book of Sonnets. It 
shows that he was already writing in his new mood, 
as he here sets down in his diary the pivotal experi- 
ence which starts and animates his whole Third 
Period. 

A reflection derived from World-Literature can- 
not help intruding itself into the foregoing con- 
clusion. Dante has in like manner made the woman 
whom he loves his deliverer, his mediator, his 
spirit's prompter and guide through Hell to 
Heaven. But Beatrice was innocent ; so we turn to 
Goethe's Margaret, the fallen and the risen soul 
through love, who thereby helps redeem her lover, 
Faust, and of whom the Chorus chants the final 
loftiest note of the poem : 



TBAGI-COMEDIES 517 

Das Ewig-Weibliche 
Zieht uns hinan. 

Which has been translated: "The Woman-Soul 
(or the Ever- Womanly) draweth us onward and 
upward." 

On April 23, 1616, Shakespeare passed away in 
his mansion of New Place, being just fifty-two 
years old, his death-day falling upon his birth-day. 
He was buried in the Stratford Church, and he 
must have taken good care to possess the most con- 
spicuous tomb in the town. Lasting if not everlast- 
ing he wished his final resting-place to endure, for 
some such motive breathes out of the inscription on 
his grave, probably the last poetry our poet ever 
wrote : 

Good friend, for Jesus' sake forbear 
To dig the dust enclosed here ; 
Blest be the man that spares these stones, 
And cursed be he that moves my bones. 

Did he have some presentiment that his sepulchre 
would be eternal, and that he, "the heir of all 
eternity", should seek to make his tomb eternal, a 
kind of Mecca for the whole English-speaking 
world? Certainly he was not indifferent to the fu- 
ture estate of his achievement and of his reputation. 
If the foregoing lines closed his poetical career, we 
shall cite a very early passage on the same theme 



518 SE ARE SPE ABE'S LIFE-DEAMA. 

which he may have intoned as a sort of prelude to 
his Life-drama (in Love's Labor's Lost): 

Let fame, that all hunt after in their lives, 
Live registered upon our brazen tombs, 
And then grace us in the disgrace of death. 
When spite of cormorant devouring Time, 
The endeavor of this present breath may buy 
That honor which shall bate his scythe's keen 

edge 
And make us heirs of all eternity. 



INDEX 



Aeschylus, 28, 131, 150-2, 

217, 442 
All's Well that Ends Well, 

84, 383, 386-7 
Amyot, Jacques, 464 
Angelo, Michael, 231 
Antony and Cleopatra, 113, 

129, 283, 285, 448-9, 468, 

508-9 
Ariosto, 217 
Arthur, King, and Knights 

of the Round Table, 37, 

39, 218, 405-6 
As You Like It, 15, 40, 69, 

121, 383-4, 460, 487 

Bacon, Francis, 50, 413 
Bandello, 287 

Barnfield, Richard, 223, 246 
Bible, the, 44, 57, 368 
Bibles, the Literary, 443, 

490 
Bion, 222 
Boar's Head Tavern, 406, 

424 
Boccaccio, 212 
Bodleian Library, 61 
Boiardo, 217 
Bosworth Field, 36 
Brooke, Arthur, 287-9, 291 
Bruno, Giordano, 328 
Burbage, Richard, 112-3, 

118, 199 

Calderon, 442 
Camden, William, 28 
Carlyle, Thomas, 248 
Carter, Rev. Thos., 58 
Catherine, Queen, 36 



Cervantes, 323 

Chapman, George, 372, 394 

Chaucer, 211, 226, 442 

Chettle, Henry, 148 

Cicero, 54 

Coleridge, S. T., 35, 164 

Comedy of Errors, 35, 82-3, 

113, 134, 268, 274, 292-4, 

297-8, 311, 315, 318, 409 
Condell, Henry, 123, 127, 

154, 483 
Corinna of Tanagra, 239 
Coriolanus, 45, 47, 448-9, 

475 
Craik, Prof. G. L., 12 
Cymbeline, 36, 277, 475, 

481-3, 487 

Dante, 38, 76, 212, 408, 443, 

490, 516 
Dark Lady, the (Mary Fit- 
ton), 34, 56, 83, 85, 215, 
266, 286, 290-1, 315, 317, 
326, 330, 416, 429, 436, 
438-9, 467-8, 470, 473, 491, 
496-7, 499, 500-1, 503, 505, 
507-8, 510-14 
D'Avenant, Sir Wm., 112 
Digges, Leonard, 126, 200 
Drake, Sir Francis, 103 

Essex, second Earl of, 249, 
399, 461-2 

Elizabeth, Queen, 36, 44, 
99, 100, 103, 142, 147, 159, 
162-3, 169-70, 204, 210-11, 
249, 272, 323, 327, 334-5, 
337-9, 351-2, 365, 380, 393, 
396-7, 399, 461, 474, 501-2 

(519) 



520 



SHAKESPEABE 'S LIFE-DBAMA 



Elze, Friedrich K., 103 
Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 

247-8, 252-3, 381 

Fairfax, Edward, 212 
Field, Richard, 111, 221, 

226 
Fitton, Mary (the "dark 

lady"), 286, 437, 501-4, 

507-10 
Florio, Giovanni, 212, 321 
Folio, the First, 122-30, 154, 

160-1, 164, 199, 267, 270, 

283, 294, 307, 332, 336, 

356, 375, 475, 482-3 
Freiligrath, Ferdinand von, 

210 
Furness, Dr. H. H., 15 

Globe Theatre, 129, 284, 
462-3 

Goethe, 48, 55, 58, 80, 151-2, 
210, 214, 220, 223, 231, 
246, 248, 289, 290, 312, 
369, 410, 432, 443, 516 

Golding, Arthur, 49, 56-7 

Gottfried von Strassburg, 
38 

Greene, Robert, 118, 146-8, 
156, 366, 394 

Grosart, 249 

Hallam, Henry, 271 

Halliwell-Phillips, James 
O., 95 

Hamlet, 44, 70, 74, 112, 
124-5, 131, 134, 137, 140, 
172-3, 186, 193, 197, 210, 
232, 249, 262, 267, 271-2, 
279, 280, 298, 330, 376, 
385, 422-3, 432, 448-9, 456, 
469-71, 475-7, 500, 504 

Hathaway, Anne, 77-8, 81-7, 
91, 222, 286, 301-2, 340, 
359, 403 



Heminge, John, 123, 127, 

154, 483 
Henry IV, King, 327, 349, 

351, 371, 399, 400-2, 405, 

409 
Henry IV, first part, 32, 94, 

184, 356, 379, 380, 389, 

397, 417 
Henry IV, second part, 32, 

97, 184, 356, 379, 380, 389, 

406 
Henry V, King, 36, 371, 

390-1, 402, 412-17, 419-21, 

423-5, 434-5 
Henry V, 31, 39, 163, 356, 

379, 389, 411-25, 462-3 
Henry VI, King, 152-3, 

158-61, 163, 167-8, 173, 

179-80, 390-1, 420-1, 425 
Henry VI, first part, 147-8, 

154-5, 162, 168, 173, 251, 

367 
Henry VI, second part, 

154-5, 157, 163, 167-8, 

171, 175 
Henry VI, third part, 115, 

142, 148, 154-5, 157, 178, 

181, 184, 347 
Hen7-y VI, Trilogy of, 185- 

8, 191, 266, 280, 336, 338, 

390-7, 425 
Henry VII, King, 33, 36 
Henry VIII, King, 44 
Henry VIII, 133, 335, 483 
Herndon, Wm. H., 67 
Herodotus, 251 
Hesiod, 28 

Holinshed, 349, 403, 464 
Homer, 28, 60, 216-7, 238-9, 

372, 432, 443 
Horace, 54, 276 
Hunt, Simon, 59, 62, 228, 

297, 321 

James I, King, 57, 352, 461 
Jenkins, Thomas, 62, 321-2 



INDEX 



521 



Jonson, Ben, 29, 54, 126, 
129, 189, 200, 274, 373, 
394 

Julius Caesar, 129, 448-9, 
508 

Keats, John, 369 

King John, 44-5, 114, 268, 

333-7, 339, 341, 343-5, 371 
King Lear, 18, 45, 112. 271, 

376, 419, 445, 448, 450. 

456, 461. 469, 496 
Knight, Charles. 156 
Kyd, Thomas, 118, 145-6, 

279, 366, 394 

La Mothe, 323 
Lancastrian Tetralogy, 392 
Lancastrian Triology, 356, 

379, 389, 390-3, 396-7, 402, 

406, 408, 411, 413-4, 416, 

420, 434, 461 
Lee, Sir Sidney, 16, 32, 

213-4, 232, 246, 458 
Lincoln, Abraham, 67-8, 72, 

322 
Livy, 226 

Lodge, Thomas, 146, 156 
Lover's Complaint, A, 218, 

229, 231, 233, 330 
Love's Labor's Lost, 55, 84, 

261, 268, 274, 292-3, 317-8, 

328-9, 331, 487, 501, 518 
Lucrece, 111, 127, 212, 218, 

224-7, 232-3 
Lucy, Sir Thomas, 96-7 
Lyly, John, 118, 146-7 

Macaulay, Thomas B., 327 
Macheth, 129, 194, 198, 

448-9, 456, 469 
Mackay, Herbert, 30 
Malone, Edmund, 112, 128, 

146, 244 
Malory, Sir Thomas, 405 



Margaret, Queen, 167-72, 
180, 192, 395, 425 

Marlowe, Christopher, 117- 
8, 143, 145-7, 149-52, 156, 
158, 163-4, 166-8, 170, 
181-7, 189-91, 199, 205, 
209-10, 214-6, 223-4, 229, 
243-4, 255, 258, 275, 336, 
341, 344, 366-74, 391, 393- 
5, 407, 416, 430, 453 

Marston, John, 283, 394 

Mary, Queen of Scots, 142, 
170, 461, 474 

Measure for Measure, 44, 
86, 241, 325, 481, 487 

Merchant of Yenice, 10, 
284, 325, 378-9, 388 

Meres, Francis, 54, 215, 
223, 294, 307 

Mermaid Tavern, 69 

Merry Wives of Windsor, 
31, 62, 97, 184, 347, 349, 
379-81 

Middleton, Thomas, 394 

Midsummer Night's Dream, 
57, 70, 103, 242, 377, 465, 
487 

Milton, 217, 442 

Mountjoy, Christopher, 
454-5, 457, 464 

Much Ado about Nothing, 
322, 383, 385 

Nash, Thomas, 146, 156, 
366 

Othello, 45, 112, 325, 445, 

448, 450, 456, 482 
Ovid, 49, 54-7, 60-1, 119, 

219, 221-3, 226, 276-7, 313 

332 

Passionate Pilgrim, 243-5 
Peele, George, 146, 156, 

366, 394 
Pembroke, third Earl of, 

439, 502, 504, 506, 514 



522 



SHAKi:SPEABE 'S LIFE-DBAMA. 



Pericles, 483 

Petrarch, 212 

Phoenix and the Turtle, 

The, 246-7, 249-51, 253 
Pindar of Thebes, 239 
Plato, 250, 328, 428 
Plautus, 54, 70, 297 
Plutarch, 96, 464-6, 508 
Porto, Luigi da, 288 
Puritanism and Puritans, 

44, 58, 70, 106-7, 174, 197, 

215, 368, 381-3 

Rabelais, 324, 455 
Raleigh, Sir Walter, 104 
Ravenscroft, Edward, 271 
Richard II, King, 333, 345- 

6, 349-52, 372, 409, 421, 
462 

Richard II, 268, 333-4, 344- 

7, 351, 392-3, 398, 418, 
462, 477 

Richard III, King, 36, 142, 
172, 180-4, 186, 189, 191-8, 
200-2, 207, 228, 336, 347, 
367, 370-1 

Richard III, 170, 172, 180, 
182, 185, 187-8, 190, 196-9, 
206-7, 266, 274, 346, 367, 
376 

Romeo and Juliet, 72, 223, 
242, 249, 268-70, 281-3, 
286-90, 305, 330, 376, 475, 
509 

Rowe, Nicholas, 96-7 

St. Paul's Cathedral, 457 
Sappho, 239 
Schiller, 151, 369 
Seneca, 54, 70, 269 
Shakespeare, John, 25, 39- 

42, 47, 67, 91, 297, 362 
Shakespeare, Mary Arden, 

25, 40-1, 43-4, 47, 80, 297, 

303, 340, 359 



Shakespearian Drama 
(The) — Comedies. Com- 
mentary by Dr. Denton 
J. Snider, 389 

Shakespearopolis, 24, 139 

Sonnets, 16, 19, 20, 98, 128, 
130, 215, 237, 240, 250, 
253, 258-66, 291, 315, 326, 
371-4, 423, 426-41, 468, 
473, 478, 488-90, 497, 503, 
505-8, 510-16 

Southampton, third Earl 
of, 212, 219, 225, 235, 
399, 439-40, 461-2, 506, 
514 

Spenser, Edmund, 28-9, 
200, 213, 220 

Spiess, Johann, 184 

Straparola, 380 

Tacitus, 466 

Taming of the Shrew, 82, 

377-8 
Tasso, 217, 220 
Taylor, Bayard, 246 
Tempest, The, 49, 76, 87, 

104, 178, 197, 211, 242, 

251, 286, 481, 483, 487, 

497 
Tennyson, 38, 406 
Terence, 54 ' 
Theobald, Lewis, 325 
Theocritus, 222 
Thorpe, Thomas, 231, 233, 

259 
Timon of Athens, 448, 450, 

469 
Tintoretto, 326 
Titian, 326 
Titus Adronicus, 48, 146, 

268-76, 278-81, 290, 418, 

475 
Troilus and Cressida, 283, 

448-50, 475 
Tyler, Thomas, 437, 503, 

507 



INDEX 



523 



Tudor, Owen, 36 

Twelfth Night, 18, 86, 379, 
381, 460, 485 

Two Gentlemen of Verona, 
268, 277, 292-3, 305, 311, 
315, 317-8, 335, 487 

Venus and Adonis, 72, 111, 
127, 212, 218-27, 233, 244- 
5, 286, 289, 459 

Virgil, 54, 56, 217, 227, 276 

Voltaire, 166 



Wagner, Richard, 38 

Wallace, Prof. Chas. Wil- 
liam, 454, 456, 458, 463 

White, Richard Grant, 319, 
342, 353 

Whitman, Walt, 152, 413 

Winter's Tale, 419, 481-3, 
485, 487 

Wright, W. A., 171 

Yorkian Tetralogy, 204, 
333-4, 330 



C 4V b9 








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